Exclusive: How NSIA MD Aminu Umar-Sadiq Started Assets Construction Project With N363 Million And Jumped To N44.8 Billion In One Year – Part 1

Secrets Reporters

The Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) for years runs opaque, without scrutiny. When a team of SecretsReporters financial reporters decided to look into its record, we found this and many more in the subsequent parts to follow.

Every big secret starts small. SecretsReporters can now show, by comparing NSIA various years financial reports side by side, exactly how a mystery construction project grew from nothing to N45 billion in just two years without a single word of public explanation at any point along the way.

At the end of 2022, NSIA’s books show zero Naira listed under “Assets under construction.” This category did not exist. End of 2023 and a new line appears called “Assets under construction” showing N363.46 million.

By the end of 2024, that same line explodes to N45.24 billion, in just one year alone. In other words, a project that did not exist on paper at the end of 2022 had grown, within two years, into a N45 billion undertaking, a jump of over 124 times in the final year alone. And at no point in either report not when it first appeared in 2023, and not when it exploded in 2024 has NSIA told the public what this project actually is.

Somewhere inside the NSIA, N44.88 billion of Nigeria’s money was spent building something in 2024. SecretsReporters can report that nobody has been told what that “something” is. Not the National Assembly, not the Nigerian public and not even a careful reader of NSIA’s own financial report can spot it out. It is sitting right there in NSIA’s own 2024 accounts, signed off personally by Managing Director/CEO Aminu Umar-Sadiq.

This single number is the main reason NSIA’s total buildings and equipment value shot up nearly ten times over from N5.3 billion to N53.76 billion in just twelve months.

To understand how big this is: N44.88 billion is more money than the entire yearly budget of several Nigerian states put together. Anywhere else in government, spending this much would come with a groundbreaking ceremony, a named builder, a finish date, and a public explanation of what it will deliver. At NSIA, it is just a number in a report, with no explanation attached.

SecretsReporters went through NSIA’s entire financial report, all 111 pages, looking for an explanation but there is none, no project name, no company doing the building, no location, no contractor’s name, no word on how much of the work is done, no total cost that this N44.88 billion is part of. For an amount this big, from a fund that belongs to every Nigerian and is overseen by the President and all 36 state governors, this silence is itself a scandal.

There are rules that govern how companies must report their spending. These rules say that if a company spends a large amount of money on something, especially a building project that is not yet finished, the company must explain what it is, because unfinished projects carry real risk as they might run over budget, get abandoned, or never get completed. NSIA’s report breaks this rule by giving a huge number with zero explanation.

On 27th March 2025, Aminu Umar-Sadiq personally signed a document promising that NSIA’s financial report does not leave out any important fact. That promise does not sit well next to a N45 billion project that appears with no explanation anywhere. Either something important was left out, breaking his promise, or NSIA thinks N45 billion is too small to bother explaining.

The NSIA Act, 2011 law says NSIA’s financial reports must give a “true and fair view” of its business. That means not just correct numbers, but a full and honest explanation. A N44.88 billion project with no explanation fails this test.

Financial Reporting Council Act, 2023, Section 7 is the exact law Umar-Sadiq used when he personally promised that nothing important was left out of NSIA’s report.

NSIA is an international standard company that follows the International accounting rules (IAS 1 and IAS 16) rules which say that when a company spends a large amount of money, especially on a building project, it must explain the project in enough detail for people to understand it. NSIA did not do this.