By Boma Lilian Braide Esq
A single administrative letter dated 7 July 2023, issued from the Office of the Chief of Staff to the President, has triggered what may become one of the most consequential transparency battles in Nigeria’s recent public finance history. At its centre is a simple but troubling question; Can executive memo lawfully override an Act of the National Assembly and quietly redirect billions of naira in statutory oil revenue?
The letter took the NUPRC 4% Cost of Collection fund, the legal lifeline that keeps Nigeria’s upstream petroleum regulator financially independent under the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), and split it in two. It left 2.5% for the regulator’s routine operations and ring fenced 1.5%, more than a third of the entire fund, for an unspecified project to upgrade crude oil and gas metering and transparency systems.
The episode fits an uncomfortably familiar pattern in Nigeria’s oil economy. From the subsidy scandals of the past decade to recurring disputes over unremitted NNPC earnings, the country has repeatedly discovered that the gap between statutory rules and administrative practice is where public wealth tends to disappear. The Treasury Single Account was introduced precisely to close that gap, consolidating government revenue under one transparent umbrella and ending the era of scattered, unmonitored accounts. If a presidential memo can still carve out fractional, semi visible allocations from a statutory fund without legislative oversight, then the safeguard the Treasury Single Account was designed to provide is only as strong as the discretion of whoever occupies the Villa at a given time.
The figures involved are not trivial. In 2022, the 4% fund totalled ₦98 billion, putting the 1.5% carve out at ₦36.75 billion. After the 2023 currency reforms, the fund rose to ₦114.838 billion, yielding ₦43.064 billion for the project. By 2024 it had climbed further still, to ₦279.692 billion, of which the earmarked share came to ₦104.884 billion. Across 2023 and 2024 alone, the directive is said to have diverted roughly ₦147.948 billion away from the regulator’s core mandate.
What happened next is where the story turns from an administrative curiosity into a governance scandal. According to records cited by the PENGASSAN oil workers’ union, which has staged field protests over the matter, about ₦98.632 billion of that ring fenced sum, one percentage point of the fund, was quietly moved to a separate downstream agency, the NMDPRA. That leaves a further 0.5%, worth ₦49.316 billion, whose destination remains unaccounted for. Public money cannot simply disappear into unmapped accounts outside the federal budget, and the absence of any clear paper trail is itself a serious governance failure.
In my recent conversations with Rt. Hon. Mark Terseer Gbillah, the former federal lawmaker who has led the push to uncover the facts, frames the matter as a question of constitutional order rather than mere bureaucratic overreach. Section 80 of the 1999 Constitution vests exclusive control over public funds in the National Assembly. Sections 12(d), 22 and 24(1) of the PIA reinforce that principle by making clear that silence in the law on how to apportion a fund is not an invitation for the executive to invent new sub accounts. When an internal memo is used to redistribute statutory oil revenue without parliamentary sanction, it does more than bend administrative procedure; it signals to investors that Nigeria’s public finances can be reshaped at the stroke of a pen rather than through settled institutional rules. That perception carries real costs, including the kind of unpredictability that unsettles capital markets and, closer to home, the labour unrest already visible in PENGASSAN’s protests over threats to workers’ welfare.
There is a second, more technical problem with the directive. The 1.5% allocation was meant to fund metering and transparency infrastructure, yet Section 7(L) and the Seventh Schedule of the PIA are explicit that NUPRC’s role in this area is limited to supervision, calibration and certification. The law places the financial burden of acquiring and installing measurement equipment squarely on the oil licensees and lessees themselves. Directing public regulatory fees to cover what is, in effect, a private capital cost looks less like prudent fiscal management and more like an unlawful subsidy to industry operators, funded by the public purse.
That raises a further set of unanswered questions. Why was such a substantial, recurring stream of national revenue committed to a single project without public tender notices, an evaluation report or any visible justification? Where, geographically and physically, has this multi billion naira metering upgrade actually been carried out? Who are the contractors, and through what process were they selected? Under Sections 16, 18 and 20 of the Public Procurement Act 2007, lawful procurement can only follow an approved budget and legislative sanction; no amount of subsequent paperwork can retroactively legalise a spending decision that had no lawful foundation to begin with.
Rather than pursue the matter through public commentary alone, Gbillah and his legal team at Chronos Legal & Co. have taken a more systematic route, filing simultaneous Freedom of Information requests with eleven federal institutions, from the Accountant General’s office to the Bureau of Public Procurement and the National Assembly’s budget committees.
The requests sought hard evidence: GIFMIS transaction logs, Treasury Single Account sub account records and budget transcripts, the kind of documentation that would allow independent verification of what actually happened to the money.
Ten of the eleven institutions allowed the statutory seven day response window to lapse without comment. Their silence speaks for itself. In a democracy governed by the rule of law, public institutions holding public money have a basic obligation to account for it when lawfully asked; refusing to respond is itself a form of admission that something requires concealment.
The one institution that did reply, the Central Bank of Nigeria, offered a response that raises as many questions as it answers. The CBN argued that because the request sought certified true copies of account records, it fell under the Evidence Act rather than the Freedom of Information Act, and therefore could not be processed. This is a distinction without a meaningful difference. The Freedom of Information Act of 2011 grants Nigerians a clear statutory right to inspect and copy public financial records; the Evidence Act simply governs how documents are authenticated for use in court proceedings. Treating the latter as a shield against the former is, at best, an overly technical reading of the law, and Gbillah’s lawyers are preparing a formal rebuttal.
A 72 hour ultimatum has now been issued to the eleven institutions. Should they continue to withhold the requested records, the legal team intends to approach the Federal High Court for an Order of Mandamus compelling disclosure. The case is being framed as the opening move in a broader push for fiscal transparency, backed by a growing coalition of retired public officials, professionals and former legislators who argue that Nigeria’s institutions have grown too comfortable operating behind closed doors.
If the restructuring of this fund and the subsequent transfers were carried out lawfully, the simplest and most persuasive response available to government would be full disclosure. Publishing the relevant memos, transaction records and procurement files would settle the matter within days. Instead, the pattern of silence and technical evasion on display so far only deepens public suspicion that something in Nigeria’s oil revenue architecture does not withstand scrutiny.
Nigeria’s Constitution places the power over public funds firmly with elected representatives for good reason: it is one of the few checks that prevents the executive from treating state revenue as a matter of internal correspondence. When that principle is quietly set aside through an administrative letter, the damage extends well beyond the naira figures involved. It erodes the basic assumption, on which both citizens and investors depend, that public money in Nigeria moves according to law rather than according to who holds the pen.
This is also a test of institutional character. Agencies such as the Bureau of Public Procurement, the Budget Office and the National Assembly’s own oversight committees exist to prevent exactly this kind of unilateral reallocation. Their collective silence in the face of a lawful information request suggests either that the required documentation does not exist in a form that can withstand scrutiny, or that no single institution wishes to be first to explain a decision it did not make. Neither possibility reflects well on the state of Nigeria’s public finance architecture, and both underline why external legal pressure, rather than internal goodwill, has become the primary route to accountability.
Whether this case ends in full disclosure or in further stonewalling, it has already demonstrated why the demand for a public trail on public money is not a partisan grievance but a constitutional one.
Nigerians have watched oil wealth vanish into administrative fog before, and each unexplained diversion, however small the percentage, adds to a deficit of trust that no growth statistic can repair. The coalition pressing this case deserves to be taken seriously, not because of who its members are, but because the questions they are asking, about a memo, a fund and billions of naira in missing accountability, are questions every Nigerian taxpayer has a right to see answered.
