By SecretsReporters review of the records of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) for 2024 shows that the agency recorded N3,864,873,743 as expenditure on welfare packages in that year, outside salaries, pensions and training. The agency placed the entire sum under that single description. The record carries no breakdown of the figure into cash allowances, food, medical support, insurance, accommodation, palliatives or any other defined benefit, and no beneficiary schedule showing dates, amounts or recipients.
Spread across the twelve months of 2024, the figure averages N322.07 million a month. Across the 366 days of the leap year, it comes to more than N10.55 million a day.
At an estimated workforce of about 1,000, the total is equivalent to nearly N3.865 million per worker for the year, or about N322,073 per worker a month. Those figures are arithmetic equivalents of the total. They are not a record of what any individual employee received.
A separate workforce figure places the agency’s staff strength at 1,750. At that headcount, the equivalent is about N2.21 million per worker for the year, or N184,042 a month. The national minimum wage is N70,000 a month, which comes to N840,000 for a full year. The per-worker welfare equivalent at the 1,000-staff figure is more than four years of that annual wage, and the monthly per-worker equivalent is more than four times the monthly minimum wage. The year’s welfare total equals the full annual minimum wage of more than 4,600 workers.
President Bola Tinubu approved the appointment of Dr Dayo Mobereola as Director-General of the agency on 11 March 2024, and the appointment was announced on 12 March 2024. He succeeded Bashir Jamoh, whose tenure ended on 10 March 2024, and he headed the agency for most of 2024. The annual total does not separate expenditure recorded before his arrival from expenditure recorded under his management.
