Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture Abubakar Kyari Paid N300 Million to Company That Does Not Exist on the Corporate Register

Secrets Reporters

Search the Corporate Affairs Commission’s (CAC) register for Jidzan Nigeria Ltd and you will find nothing. No record under “Ltd”, none under “Limited”, none at all. Yet contract records seen by SecretsReporters show that the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, under Minister Abubakar Kyari, awarded this invisible company two contracts worth N300 million.

The first award was N150 million for the provision of one unit of tissue culture laboratory, two screen houses and one glasshouse. The second was N150 million for the procurement of litres of cypermethrin, a cotton insecticide, to be distributed to cotton farmers. Both were recorded as single-bidder transactions.

Jidzan is the largest single-supplier taker in the ministry’s award records for the period under review by our team of reporters. Beyond the two contracts, the company has no website, no news mention, no corporate profile, and now no registration on the CAC database, where a check of every name variant returned no record. A search of the company on other corporate directory for the bare term “Jidzan” returned literally “Nothing found.”

The two contracts cover entirely unrelated items: a biotechnology laboratory on the one hand, insecticide on the other. A tissue culture laboratory is a specialized scientific facility. There is no public record of what Jidzan Nigeria Ltd does, who owns it, or where it operates.

The Public Procurement Act 2007 requires that only eligible, qualified bidders participate in public procurement, and the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020 requires every company doing business in Nigeria to be registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission and an award to a name with no registration cannot satisfy either requirement.