By The last day of 2025 was a working day at the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Sustainable Development Goals, and the payment record shows what the work was. On 31 December 2025 alone, fifty nine payments left the office, carrying N9,634,357,838.80 out of the federal purse in a single day, to companies building hostels, shops and sundry works across the country. The office is headed by Princess Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire, and the day was no accident of the calendar. It was the crest of a wall of money that had been building all month.
SecretsReporters investigation of the payment records of the office puts the full picture in numbers. Between January 2025 and June 2026, the office made 415 reportable payments totalling N63,292,326,248.15, tax remittances set aside. Of that entire sum, N34,996,450,773.81 moved in December 2025 alone, in 221 payments, fifty five percent of everything the office paid out in eighteen months, compressed into the final month of the year.
Money does not flow from this office in a stream. It falls in walls, a burst in February 2025, another in March, another in September, and then December, a wall so much larger than the rest that it stands in a class of its own. The payments are marked interim payment and practical completion, the language of construction contracts certified and settled, and on the year’s final day the certifications fell due together, fifty nine of them, as though the office had held its breath for eleven months and exhaled on 31 December.
The last day carried the month’s largest single payments. Jefes Engr Nig Ltd took N588,925,581.34 on 31 December as an interim payment for the construction and furnishing of a hostel block, phase one, at DUFUTH. Two weeks earlier, on 15 December, Easystone Project and Services Ltd took N432,760,107.95 at practical completion for five blocks of twenty lock up shops and four open stalls at Amaraku. Hostels and market stalls, certified complete or part complete in the middle of December and paid before the year turned.
One December name carries a past the office already knew. Obagold Investment Limited had been publicly reported the year before over school, borehole and streetlight contracts it was paid for and did not execute in Lagos and Ogun states. The office’s answer, on this record, was to keep paying it. Inside this window the company took a further N1,023,347,144 from the office, and the largest slice of it, N728,257,277.64, landed on 31 December 2025, at practical completion, for the construction of a block of nurse hostel on one suspended floor at a federal neuro-psychiatric facility.
The woman at the head of the office has held it longer than any comparable aide in the presidency. Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire, a former deputy governor of Lagos State, was appointed Senior Special Assistant to the President on Sustainable Development Goals on 7 March 2016, and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu reappointed her on 14 September 2023. Every payment in this record falls inside her tenure. The goals her office carries are the world’s goals, health, education, water, decent work, and the instruments on this record are contracts, hundreds of them, let to companies whose own standing the payment record never mentions.
The companies register mentions it. Of the sixteen companies that took the most money from this office in the window, ten stand marked INACTIVE on the register of the Corporate Affairs Commission, the status the Commission sets against a company that has fallen out of compliance, its annual returns unfiled. The inactive are not the tail of the list. They are its head.
Seven of the eleven biggest beneficiaries of the office are inactive companies. Guyatse Nig Ltd, the single largest beneficiary of the entire record at N1,176,667,647, stands inactive. Sparktech Global Ventures Limited took N923,841,269, inactive. LRB Global Investment Limited took N911,490,994, inactive. Writes Energy Limited took N836,958,377, inactive. Truetech Global Investment Services Limited took N770,638,599, inactive. Station 5 Limited took N757,195,301, inactive. Hawawu Global Ventures Limited took N719,638,607, inactive. Between them, the seven inactive companies at the head of the list took N6,096,430,794 of the office’s money. Jefes Engr Nig Ltd, paid on the last day of the year, stands inactive as well.
Federal contracts are not open to every comer. The Public Procurement Act reserves them for bidders who meet its qualification requirements, and a company’s standing on the register of the Corporate Affairs Commission is the first proof of the corporate life the law expects a contractor to be living, returns filed, records current. On this record, the office’s biggest cheques went to companies the register itself flags as out of compliance, and the December wall was built substantially of such names.
Three of those names were born together. LRB Global Investment Limited was registered on 1 November 2018. Hawawu Global Ventures Limited was registered on the same day, 1 November 2018. Truetech Global Investment Services Limited followed the next day, 2 November 2018. Their registration numbers, 1538141, 1538082 and 1538167, fall inside a span of eighty five numbers on the register. Seven years later, the three companies stood together near the head of the payment record of the President’s SDG office, all three inactive, all three paid, their incorporation papers separated by a single day and their names separated by nothing the register can explain.
