Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Yusuf Ahmed Spent N47 Million Flying to Six Countries in 2023 While Nigeria’s Only Two Nuclear Waste Away

Secrets Reporters

Prof. Yusuf Aminu Ahmed ran Nigeria’s Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC) for the whole of 2023 as the sole Chairman/CEO, three years into the term President Muhammadu Buhari gave him in September 2021. 

Payments made by the DG and SecretsReporters shows that in that single year, six of NAEC’s thirteen recorded payments went to one place: Ahmed’s own personal travel account, for six separate international trips, totalling ₦47,224,527, a sum that came within ₦3.4 million of matching everything the Commission spent that year on its only two capital projects combined.

The itinerary reads like a diplomatic calendar rather than a nuclear regulator’s travel schedule. In April, NAEC paid Ahmed ₦5,063,500 to close out his trip to the UNFCCC’s COP27 follow-up in Egypt, and ₦12,230,000 more for a combined swing through Geneva for a GGE NDV meeting and Addis Ababa for an NLO/Africa NC gathering ₦17.29 million in a single month. 

In May, another ₦5,798,527 went out for a UN meeting in Switzerland. By November, NAEC had paid him ₦11,380,000 for the IAEA General Conference in Austria, ₦6,500,000 for the UN General Assembly in the United States, and ₦6,252,500 for an AFRA Technical Working Group meeting in Algeria. Six trips, six continents’ worth of diplomacy, one Chairman, ₦47.2 million more than a third of everything NAEC spent on companies and individuals that year.

Set against that travel bill, the Commission’s actual nuclear infrastructure work looks thin. NAEC paid Etonbra (Nigeria) Limited ₦32,476,167 to build the FGN/IAEA Maritime Contamination Coastal Field Monitoring Station in Koluama, Bayelsa State, a facility meant to track radioactive and chemical contamination along Nigeria’s coastline and paid APN Constructions Nig. Limited ₦18,153,354 to build the Low and Intermediate Nuclear Waste Management Facility at the Nuclear Technology Centre in Sheda, the installation meant to safely store the radioactive waste Nigeria’s nuclear research programme generates. 

Combined, those two facilities, the entirety of NAEC’s stated 2023 capital programme cost ₦50,629,521, barely edging out what it cost to fly the Chairman around the world six times in the same twelve months. The remainder of the year’s spending went to routine diesel deliveries and a single equipment purchase for a research centre in Ile-Ife, nothing more.