By Secrets Reporters
Kano State under then-Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje raised N18.425 billion from the capital market in 2021 and completed a cancer treatment centre, a flyover, and an inland dry port with the proceeds but produced no cost-benefit analysis before borrowing, and the state’s flagship cancer facility now sits under-utilised for lack of patronage from the very public it was built to serve.
Auditors physically verified five projects funded by the N18.425 billion bond: the Cancer Treatment Centre and its supplied medical equipment at Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital in Giginyu, both listed at 100 percent completion; the Kofar Mata to Ibrahim Taiwo Road flyover, an 800-metre, 27-span bridge structure, also 100 percent complete; the Dala Inland Dry Port in Zawachiki, complete and operational; and a faculty block project at Yusuf Maitama Sule University that remains only partially finished, with the Faculty of Science theatre section and the entire Faculty of Art complex still outstanding more than a decade after they were first awarded in 2012
Good record-keeping, no cost-benefit analysis, and a cancer centre nobody is using
Investigators credited officials at the Kano State Ministry of Finance with “very good record keeping and retrieval”, a rare compliment in a report otherwise dominated by missing files. But the same investigators found no evidence that a cost-benefit analysis detailing the economic and social benefits of any of the bond-funded projects was produced before project approval and commencement, in violation of Section 44(1) of the FRA 2007, and no indication that the Ganduje administration sought the Proof of Compliance that Section 45 of the Act requires before the bond was raised.
Perhaps the most striking finding has nothing to do with money spent and everything to do with money wasted: the Cancer Treatment Centre at Giginyu, built with borrowed public funds and outfitted with an immune analyser, a CT scan machine and a microbiology laboratory, is under-utilized because of a lack of patronage from within and outside Kano State. Nigerians borrowed against their future for a facility that, years later, the same taxpayers are not using.
Kano State finished what it built with the N18.425 billion bond; the state simply never bothered to show the law was followed before it borrowed, and never got its own citizens into the cancer centre it built.
The commission saddled with accountability power has urged the current Kano State Government, now under Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, to ensure that any future borrowing seeks and obtains proof of compliance under Parts IX and X of the FRA, and that the state, Ministry of Health and hospital management create the public awareness needed to raise patronage of the cancer centre, both for patient outcomes and to recover the revenue the facility was designed to generate.
