Secrets Reporters
A devastating trail of financial mismanagement, expired relief supplies and unaccounted public funds running into more than ₦2.18 billion at the National Emergency Management Agency during a critical period when millions of Nigerians displaced by conflict and disasters desperately needed help, has been revealed by findings obtained by SecretsReporters.
The revelations, obtained exclusively by this newspaper, paint a picture of an agency that deposited over a billion naira for an aircraft that never arrived, allowed donated food meant for starving internally displaced persons to rot in warehouses for years, and failed to recover assets and advances while taxpayers footed the bill.
At the centre of the most shocking finding is a shipment of rice donated by the Chinese government in 2017 specifically for IDPs in the North-East. The consignment, consisting of 135,000 bags of 50kg rice, sat undistributed in NEMA warehouses from October 2017. By an April 2020 inspection, 26,106 bags valued at ₦673,076,527.50 had expired and been destroyed by pests and rodents.
An additional batch of 25kg bags worth ₦73,709,041.20 had also gone bad, bringing the total value of wasted donated rice to ₦746,785,568.70. This occurred even as reports of acute hunger and malnutrition among IDPs in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe dominated national and international headlines.
The same period saw NEMA award a separate ₦2.4 billion contract for 160,000 bags of rice in 2018. The failure to move the Chinese donation before it spoiled has left questions about prioritisation and basic logistics at an agency created precisely to respond to emergencies.
The waste was not limited to food. Relief materials including toiletries, mosquito nets, cement and other items procured more than three years earlier, valued at ₦113,676,385.25, had expired or been damaged in storage. These items crowded warehouses and risked contaminating remaining stock, further compounding the agency’s inability to deliver timely aid.
Even more startling is the fate of ₦1,054,222,576 deposited with an Israeli company as far back as 2010 for the procurement of a new aircraft. A decade later, in March 2020, the aircraft had still not been delivered and there was no evidence of any refund. The money simply sat with the foreign firm while NEMA’s operational capacity remained constrained. Sources familiar with the matter indicated that legal action was later pursued and a judgment obtained in NEMA’s favour, yet the funds had not been recovered and returned to the treasury at the time the issues came to light.
Other irregularities compound the picture. Statutory taxes of ₦19,193,452.82 on payments for relief-material supplies were never deducted even though the amounts appeared on contractors’ invoices.
Unretired non-personal advances from 2018 and 2019 totalled ₦147,380,286.37. A consultant paid ₦96,467,673.76 between 2014 and 2017 to acquire vehicles, generators and office partitions for zonal offices in Enugu, Lagos and Kaduna never delivered the assets; zonal coordinators confirmed they had never seen the items after the contract was terminated in 2019. Thirteen paid vouchers amounting to ₦79,906,260 from 2018 were simply not presented for examination, leaving no trail of what the money was spent on.
The period covered by these findings straddled the tenures of two Directors-General. Engr. Mustapha Yunusa Maihaja held the office from March 2017 until he was removed by President Muhammadu Buhari on 30 April 2020. His tenure had already been marked by intense public controversy over the handling of the Chinese rice donation, demurrage payments running into hundreds of millions of naira, and earlier parliamentary probes into billions of naira in emergency intervention funds. Air Vice Marshal Muhammadu Alhaji Muhammed (rtd) took over on the same day Maihaja was sacked and remained in office through the end of 2020.
The warehouse inspection that confirmed the mass spoilage of rice occurred right at the handover. Ahmed Mustapha Habib was later appointed Director-General in 2021.
These exclusive findings raise fundamental questions about accountability in an agency whose core mandate is to protect the most vulnerable Nigerians in times of crisis. While IDPs faced hunger and warehouses filled with rotting food and damaged materials, hundreds of millions of naira remained tied up in undelivered aircraft, unrecovered advances, missing assets and unremitted taxes.
