Secrets Reporters
Edward-Amodu Ori Mary did not build anything for the Ministry of Interior. She supplied no computers, no vehicles, no uniforms, nothing. Her name appears in the ministry’s own payment records simply because money was made to pass through it. Three payments totalling N18.3 million are listed against her name, each of them described as allowances for personnel of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps deployed to the ministry.
Her entry is not an exception. In the payment records of the minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo office examined by SecretsReporters, four officers of the ministry collected a combined N65.9 million in their personal names. In a normal system, allowances would have been paid to the officers who earned them, training fees to the company that did the training, and travel money to the airlines and hotels that carried the minister. Instead the money went through private names.
Okonji Dumebi Emmanuel collected N14.6 million across two payments. The first, N9,236,977, was recorded as training expenses “in favour of Ads Prestige Ltd.” The company never received the money. It was paid to Okonji, and what happened between his name and the company’s account is not in the records. The second payment, N5,412,311, was for a Kigali study trip. Once again, it was Okonji’s name on the payment.
The Financial Regulations treat this kind of routing as what it is. When public money passes through the hands of an individual officer, it becomes a personal advance, and the law demands that every such advance be properly retired, with documentation proving the money reached its destination. The payment records show the money leaving the treasury but SecretsReporters could not trace it arriving anywhere.
The point of the retirement rule is simple in civil service as public money must be traceable from the treasury to the final hand that earns it. When a training fee owed to Ads Prestige Ltd is entered in an individual’s name, the company becomes a bystander in its own transaction and the officer becomes the accounting unit. If the money moved on, only Okonji’s own records would say so.
Inedu M. Keche collected N18.9 million across three payments, the largest sum of the four. One of those payments, N6,303,000 on December 4, 2023, was described as being “for Hon. Minister and entourage.”
Ayandele Rafiu Niyi collected N14.1 million across two payments, both recorded as DTA, duty tour allowance, for the minister’s trips. Duty tour allowance is money meant for the traveler and the traveller here was the minister but the payee was an aide.
Put the four together and the picture is of a minister’s office that preferred to move money through the names of officers instead of paying providers and beneficiaries directly. The allowances of security personnel, the training fees owed to a company, the travel costs of the minister himself, all of it passed through private names before reaching wherever it ended up, which is what the Fiscal Responsibility Act forbids – the misapplication of public funds.
