CSOs Seek Probe Of Alleged N78.8bn Cash Transfer Scandal

BY BUKOLA ARO-LAMBO, OLUGBENGA SOYELE

Civil Society groups in the country and legal luminary Femi Falana have called for a probe into the Alleged N7.8 billion cash transfer scandal.

The CSOs are the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC),

The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has called on President Bola Tinubu to order a full-scale investigation into alleged financial irregularities involving more than N78.8 billion within the Federal Government’s cash transfer and social protection programmes.

SERAP appeal followed findings by the Auditor-General for the Federation raising concerns over the management, documentation, and verification of billions of naira managed by the National Cash Transfer Office (NCTO) and the National Social Safety Nets Coordinating Office (NASSCO).

These concerns are detailed in the 2024 Annual Report on Non-Compliance/Internal Control Weaknesses in Ministries, Departments and Agencies of the Federal Government, published on 7 August 2026.

The audit report covers transactions from January 2023 to December 2024.

The report further highlighted the transfer of N33.751 billion in 2023 to 3,295,207 households and beneficiaries across 35 states under the cash transfer scheme, but claimed that the Federal Government could not produce sufficient evidence to confirm that the funds reached eligible beneficiaries.

Auditors reportedly could not authenticate payments due to missing complete beneficiary information and the absence of relevant REMITA statements for reconciliation with the National Social Register and National Beneficiary Register.

In the letter dated 5 September 2026 and signed by its Deputy Director, Kolawole Oluwadare, SERAP urged Tinubu to instruct the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction and related agencies to publish a comprehensive audit trail of the N33.751 billion.

The organisation stated that records should include details of beneficiaries, payments, verification procedures, authorisations, and reconciliation processes, and that the government should clarify why the REMITA records requested by auditors were not provided.

SERAP also called for an inquiry into N36.744 billion reportedly paid in December 2023 without prepayment or internal audit checks, as well as N4.616 billion in expenditures lacking adequate supporting documents.

Additional transactions mentioned by the organisation include N350.182 million released to state coordinators for enrolling unbanked beneficiaries without proper beneficiary lists or acknowledgements; N89.511 million spent on store items not delivered or recorded in the store ledger; and N17.422 million advanced to staff for diesel purchases.

The audit also reportedly identified N280.42 million paid to payment service providers as mobilisation and advance payments without Guarantee documentation, as well as N393.71 million in unspent funds disbursed to nine states for beneficiary enrolment, which could not be traced to the Consolidated Revenue Fund.

The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) has specifically called for a comprehensive, independently audited account of funds disbursed under Nigeria’s externally financed cash transfer programme, amid growing concerns over transparency and accountability in its implementation.

Chairman, Board of Amnesty International Nigeria and Executive Director, CISLAC, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, said the programme had raised “significant questions about transparency, accountability and value for money,” particularly given the absence of a comprehensive audit showing how much of the borrowed funds actually reached verified beneficiaries.

“With approximately $744.61 million reportedly disbursed and only about 5.6 million households receiving at least one payment, the Federal Government has an obligation to clearly account for beneficiary transfers, administrative and transaction costs, verification expenditure and any outstanding or unaccounted funds,” Rafsanjani said.

He said the apparent gap between programme financing and verifiable outcomes strengthened the case for tighter public financial controls and for restructuring Nigeria’s social protection system around transparent, independently auditable financing.

“Borrowing to protect vulnerable citizens during severe economic shocks can be justified, but repeatedly financing recurrent household transfers through debt becomes unsustainable where beneficiary coverage remains inadequate, and expenditure cannot be fully verified,” he said.

Rafsanjani urged the government to progressively move towards predictable domestic financing of recurrent social protection through transparent budgetary appropriations and stronger parliamentary oversight.

He called for every disbursement to be traceable from the programme account through payment service providers to uniquely identified and validated beneficiaries.

He said beneficiary databases should be independently reconciled against national identification systems to detect duplication, fictitious beneficiaries and other irregularities.

He added that the methodology for selecting beneficiaries, geographical distribution of payments, payment cycles and the proportion of beneficiaries receiving the full intended support should be publicly disclosed.

Rafsanjani further advocated a publicly accessible social protection transparency dashboard that shows funds received, amounts disbursed, beneficiaries reached by state and local government area, administrative costs, payment success rates, and audit status.

He said stronger procurement transparency was also required, with major contracts for beneficiary registration, digital platforms, consultancy, payment processing, monitoring and verification disclosed alongside contract values, procurement methods, beneficial ownership and implementation status.

He also called for future tranches to be tied to independently verified performance indicators, warning that no subsequent tranche should be authorised where previous disbursements remain materially unreconciled.

According to him, the National Assembly should conduct rigorous oversight of the programme, while the Auditor General should refer substantiated cases of fraud, diversion or corrupt conduct to the appropriate anti-graft agencies.

Chief Executive of the Centre for the Promotion of Public Enterprise, Dr Muda Yusuf, echoed the call for greater transparency, saying Nigeria’s continued access to international support would depend in part on how the programme was managed.

“For the country to continue to enjoy the support of the international community, we need to manage these processes more transparently, as we reduce the corruption risk involved.

We need to be much more transparent about how these things are managed. That’s very important in order to preserve the integrity of the whole social intervention programme,” Yusuf said.

He added that the World Bank’s response would depend on the scale of the discrepancy and how the specific programme was viewed. “I know the World Bank is involved in many projects.

This is just one. If the framework for the administration of this one is not good, they may decide to stay away from this particular project and continue with the others,” he said.

Meanwhile, analysts have downplayed the direct financial risk posed by discrepancies in the programme, even as they underscore the transparency concerns raised by CISLAC.

Chief Investment Officer and Head, Asset Management, VNL Capital Assets, Ifeayi Ubah, said the gap was unlikely to derail Nigeria’s access to World Bank financing, noting that fiduciary control failures are common in reviews of World Bank borrower programmes and are typically handled through tighter conditionality — such as ring-fenced accounts and disbursement-linked indicators — rather than blocked access.

He said the discrepancy, totalling $25 million, was “trivial against total debt stock and debt service” and would not move Nigeria’s debt sustainability metrics.

However, he said its real weight lay in the governance signal it sent, reinforcing public finance management weaknesses already tracked in sovereign and international financial institution reviews, and feeding into conditionality on Nigeria’s next facility — alongside separate legal and political exposure before agencies such as the EFCC and the Public Accounts Committee.

Ubah said the credible response was not a restructuring of Nigeria’s debt, but stronger controls tying future disbursements to verified beneficiaries — a push the World Bank was already making through biometric verification via the Bank Verification Number (BVN) and National Identification Number (NIN) systems.