Secrets Reporters
While Nigerians groaned under subsidy removal, currency collapse, and record inflation through 2023 and 2024, the man at the helm of the country’s revenue authority, Mr Zacchaeus Adelabu Adedeji, was presiding over a spending spree so staggering it reads less like a public agency’s budget performance and more like a private empire’s expense account.
SecretsReporters ongoing investigation has reviewed the figures the FIRS/NRS Executive Chairman have spent while heading the agency.
In 2023, Adedeji’s annual salary stood at N54,878,485, alongside a 30% subsistence allowance of N16,463,546. By the very next year, that salary had climbed to N84,812,204, a jump of nearly N30 million in a single year, at a time when the federal government was still congratulating itself for grudgingly approving a new national minimum wage for ordinary Nigerian workers.
In 2024 alone, FIRS/NRS under Zaach spent N7,495,004,001 on local training, a figure that all but exhausted the N7,500,415,000 approved for the line, spent down to the last few hundred thousand Naira with almost surgical precision.
As if the local figure were not staggering enough, another N3,999,126,790 was reportedly spent by the renamed FIRS boss on international training in 2024 again, spent down to within roughly N873,000 of the full N4,000,000,000 approved. Combined, local and international training alone accounted for nearly N11.5 billion in a single year which is more than the entire annual budget of several federal ministries reviewed by our reporters.
Domestic travel spending climbed from N2,615,597,469 in 2023 to N4,032,066,993 in 2024, an increase of over N1.4 billion in a single year, for travel that never left Nigerian soil.
International travel spending followed the same trajectory, from N1,249,687,891 in 2023 to N1,999,937,977 in 2024, again spent down to within N62,000 of the full N2,000,000,000 approved. Between local and international travel in 2024 alone, the agency reportedly spent just over N6 billion moving people around the country and the world.
In 2024, Mr Zaach spent N140,000,000 under a “security vote” line, against an approved N262,500,000. In Nigeria, heads of federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies are not entitled to security votes under Nigerian fiscal rules. Security votes are a discretionary allocation historically reserved for state governors as chief security officers of their states not for the head of a revenue-collection agency.
Rounding out the picture, N2,264,143,659 was reportedly spent on “operational meetings and retreats” in 2024 alone against an approved N2,500,000,000.
Add training, travel, security vote and retreats together, and Zaach has spent in excess of N23.8 billion.
This is an ongoing investigation into the spending galore of the Executive Chairman
