By Tunde Akinola

Nigerians know a particular kind of disappointment by heart. A governor breaks ground, a brass band plays, cameras flash, and months later the site sits waist-high in weeds. It barely makes the news anymore, yet the scale should stop us cold. A former Director-General of the Budget Office told the National Assembly that over 56,000 government projects nationwide remain uncompleted. A 2011 presidential assessment committee counted 11,886 abandoned federal projects nationwide, at a cost of N7.78 trillion to finish, and a 2024 Senate motion cited that same unrevised figure thirteen years on. A separate 2021 survey found a similar number, roughly 11,866, in abandoned federal buildings alone, this time valued at N20 trillion, and that count resurfaced in a 2025 House debate. Two different surveys, over a decade apart, converging on the same order of ruin, and no administration in between produced an account of what happened.

Every one of those failures began as a signed contract. That is the detail we skip past on our way to outrage. Procurement is the conversion mechanism between a budget line and a finished clinic, and Nigeria is bad at that conversion: a need poorly defined, a tender built on relationships rather than merit, a payment released without proof of work. But procurement alone cannot explain why the same order of abandonment keeps recurring across decades and administrations. That is political, not technical: who is permitted to start a project with no plan to finish it, who controls its variations, and what happens to either once the weeds grow back.

One clear answer sits in the budget process itself. BudgIT found that the National Assembly inserted 11,122 projects worth N6.93 trillion into the 2025 budget alone, among them 3,573 assigned directly to federal constituencies and 1,972 to senatorial districts. Thirty-nine per cent of the total, 4,371 projects worth N1.72 trillion, landed in the Ministry of Agriculture alone, nearly eight times its original capital budget. The honest answer to who pays for failure is usually nobody. A groundbreaking ceremony earns its value the day the band plays, and a vanished contractor faces, at most, a civil suit few agencies pursue.

The EFCC’s Executive Chairman, Ola Olukoyede, has said contract and procurement fraud accounts for more than 90 per cent of public sector fraud cases the Commission handles. Separately, government’s own anti-graft estimates, cited by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation at a 2025 Bureau of Public Procurement training programme, put the annual cost of procurement corruption at roughly $18 billion. Different speakers, different events, same order of magnitude. That is not leakage. It is a haemorrhage.

Take two contracts inside a single prosecution now before the courts. A former Director-General of the National Metallurgical Development Centre in Jos is accused of approving nearly N16.6 million to one contractor for fettling facilities, despite the contractor’s alleged failure to perform, a lapse at the most basic control there is: verifying delivery before payment. In a separate contract the same year, he is accused of approving N51.5 million to another contractor for an electric crucible furnace, again despite alleged non-performance, then re-approving the same contract at nearly N59 million without the mandatory performance bond meant to guard against a repeat. Two contracts, the same control failing each time.

Procurement is often reduced to buying things, corruption to bribery. Neither captures what is at stake. Skilful procurement means defining what a project genuinely requires, pricing it against real market costs and contractor capability, running independent tenders, and managing the contract after signature so payment tracks verified delivery. That is where both NMDC contracts broke down; it is also where thousands of inserted budget lines will break if nobody is made to verify delivery.

The Bureau of Public Procurement under Dr Adebowale Adedokun is pursuing genuine reform, anchored by a mandatory Digital Submission Portal and a professionalisation drive built on formal certification. Adedokun calls procurement a catalyst for national transformation, and he is right, but a portal only digitises the paperwork trail of a decision; it does not decide who gets to start an underfunded project, nor put anyone at personal risk for paying against undelivered work. The Public Procurement Act 2007 already gives Nigeria a workable legal foundation. What is missing is the political will to enforce it.

None of this is solved by better software or another amendment to the law. It requires tracing a contract from need to final payment, naming the point a control was skipped, and asking who benefited. The two NMDC contracts offer one answer; the N6.93 trillion inserted into the 2025 budget alone points to thousands more waiting for the same scrutiny. Until that scrutiny becomes routine, the dividends of democracy that procurement is supposed to deliver will keep arriving late, or not at all.

Akinola is a procurement consultant and a political writer.