Nigerian Police Conspires With House of Reps Member Austin Achado To Pay N725 Million For Consultancy To His Company In One Day

Secrets Reporters

In a single day in May 2026, Nigeria’s Police Formations and Commands transferred more than ₦725 million to Archtik Consultants Limited as 90 percent part-payments for consultancy services covering the construction of modern police area commands across a dozen states, the completion of the FCT Command Headquarters permanent site in Utako, Abuja, and the building of an armoury and store in the capital. These were not isolated transactions. Between late 2024 and mid-2026 the same firm received well over ₦1 billion from the same federal police budget line for related consultancy work on police buildings, infrastructure rehabilitation, an institute of finance and administration, and secondary-school facilities.

The single-day total of ₦725,911,991.12 comprises four 90 percent part-payments: ₦195,368,315.56 for commands in Kogi, Ebonyi, Bayelsa, Ondo and Ogun; ₦223,348,583.79 for Ekiti, Imo, Kano and Niger; ₦83,785,765.36 covering Oyo State work, the FCT Command Headquarters permanent site at Utako and related rehabilitation; and ₦223,409,326.41 for the Abuja armoury and store together with commands in Kaduna and Borno.

Archtik Consultants Limited is controlled by Austin Asema Achado, the All Progressives Congress member of the House of Representatives for Gwer East/Gwer West Federal Constituency in Benue State. Corporate records list him as a director. Achado, a trained architect and Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Architects, founded the firm after leaving Benue State public service in the 1990s and entered the National Assembly in 2023. The company’s public portfolio already features earlier Nigeria Police Force projects, including hostels in Abuja and the Yobe State Police Command Headquarters.

Nigerian law draws a bright line against precisely this arrangement. The Fifth Schedule to the 1999 Constitution and the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act forbid any public officer employed on a full-time basis from engaging or participating in the management or running of a private business, profession or trade; farming is the only explicit exception.

Holding a directorship is widely understood by the Code of Conduct Bureau itself to constitute prohibited management. Civil Service Rules state that public officers must not serve as directors of private companies.

The Public Procurement Act 2007 defines conflict of interest to include any direct or indirect interest in a bidder or service provider that could confer personal gain through influence over procurement decisions, and it requires disclosure and recusal. None of these safeguards appears to have interrupted the flow of contracts.

The pattern is familiar. Political officeholders or their proxies retain control of private companies that then become preferred recipients of public contracts, particularly in opaque consultancy and construction niches where technical evaluation is difficult to scrutinise. The result is a quiet form of contract racketeering: public funds intended for security infrastructure are systematically redirected toward a narrow circle of politically connected firms. While hundreds of millions of naira move for “consultancy,” ordinary police stations remain under-equipped, officers’ welfare stays precarious, and citizens continue to live with inadequate protection. The same political class that appropriates and oversees these budgets simultaneously profits from them.

This is not merely a legal technicality. It is a structural feature of elite accumulation that keeps the poor poor and steadily dissolves the residual trust Nigerians still place in government. Every fresh revelation of connected contracts reinforces the widespread conviction that the state exists primarily to enrich its operators. Until asset declarations, director resignations, procurement disclosures and independent audits are enforced without selective blindness, the cycle will persist: contracts for the connected, stagnation for everyone else, and a deepening gulf between citizens and those who claim to represent them.