EXCLUSIVE: NIMASA DG Dayo Mobereola Lavished N1.92 Billion on Hotels and Board Sittings in One Year

The SecretsReporters examination of the 2024 expense records of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency found N1,916,857,306 recorded against just two overhead items. Item 11 of the records carries N900,500,000 for hotel accommodation. Item 12 carries N1,016,357,306 for board and committee expenses. The board entry alone accounts for about 53 per cent of the combined total.

The two entries name nothing underneath the money. On the face of the records there is no hotel, no guest, no room, no booking date, no committee, no member, no meeting date, no attendance record and no decision produced, against N1.92 billion of public money.

N900.5 million for hotels, and not one room named

The hotel figure works out at more than N75 million every month of 2024. A market survey of currently advertised standard room prices at premium hotels in Lagos and Abuja supports a generous high-end benchmark of N200,000 to N400,000 a room night. Present-day prices, rather than the generally lower prices of 2024, make the comparison conservative.

Even at N400,000 a night, N900.5 million pays for about 2,251 room nights. At N300,000 a night it buys about 3,001 room nights. At N200,000 a night it covers about 4,502 room nights. The lowest of those comparisons is still the equivalent of more than six premium rooms occupied every night of the year. The entry does not state who occupied any of them, where they stayed, or how long any stay lasted.

N1.016 billion for boards and committees, and not one meeting named

The Federal Government’s cost-control benchmark for part-time boards places sitting allowances between N40,000 and N150,000 for a chairman and between N30,000 and N120,000 for a member, with four meetings a year treated as an adequate ceiling for ordinary board business.

Measured against the very top of those ranges, NIMASA’s N1,016,357,306 equals about 6,775 chairman sittings at N150,000 each, or about 8,469 member sittings at N120,000 each. On an illustrative board of eleven, one chairman and ten members, one complete sitting at the maximum rates costs N1.35 million. At that rate the recorded figure finances about 752 full board meetings, more than two complete board meetings for every day of the year, weekends included.

The label on the entry does not state whether travel, hotels, refreshments or other costs were bundled into the same figure. The record carries the single broad description and no breakdown of what the money bought.

Dr Dayo Mobereola became Director-General of the agency in March 2024, appointed on 11 March 2024 with the presidential statement confirming the appointment dated 12 March 2024, after Bashir Jamoh’s tenure ended. He led the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency for roughly nine and a half months of the year covered by these records. The annual entries carry no transaction dates and do not separate the spending inherited from his predecessor from the spending processed under his own management, and this report invents no such separation. The N1,916,857,306 is a full-year agency total recorded in the year he took charge of the agency.