By A SecretsReporters audit of the official payment records of the Nigerian Correctional Service shows the feeding racket did not end with 2025. In November and December 2025 the Service paid N873,389,974.30 in shortfall, new-rate and balance top-ups across 40 payments. From February to June 2026 it made 132 payments outside its payroll channels totalling N2,919,589,398.32, of which 115 were ration payments worth N2,662,240,002.48, and the money kept flowing to the same vendors, companies the Corporate Affairs Commission cannot find on its register or lists as inactive. Sylvester Ndidi Nwakuche has run the Service as acting Controller-General from 15 December 2024 and as substantive Controller-General from 25 March 2025, and every payment in this record sits on his watch.
The shortfall wave of late 2025
The background is a rate that was approved and never paid. The government approved an increase in the inmate feeding rate from N750 to N1,125 per day effective 1 August 2024, the increase was never implemented, and payments continued at the old rate. The feeding contractors say the unpaid money has grown to about N30.7 billion, made up of a N7.7 billion backlog from 2023 and about N23 billion of shortfall accumulated to July 2025. What the payment records show is how the arrears were settled: in a rush at the end of 2025, in the 40 top-up payments above. Five of them were made on a single day, 30 December 2025, each for exactly N67,900,000 and together N339,500,000, each described as payment of the short-fall balance of the new rate for January to December 2024 at the High Court, a court-ordered backlog cleared in the last days of the year. Section 38 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 requires public expenditure to follow the appropriation in an orderly, rule-bound way. A top-up stream of that size, run years behind the rate it was meant to honour, is the opposite shape.
The same vendors, into 2026
The eight vendors standing flagged on the companies register collected N466,080,713.80 across 12 payments in the first half of 2026. Mosco Soa Nig. Ltd., for which no registration record could be located, received N93,371,349.38 for Lagos ration on 26 March 2026 and N11,981,889.56 for Kebbi ration the following day. Its Sokoto short-fall payment, N87,879,120 for September 2025 ration, belongs to the wave above: it was paid on 30 December 2025. Baggio Brothers and Company, a business name standing inactive on the register, collected Bauchi ration money twice, N27,520,593.75 on 25 February 2026 and N60,369,990.63 on 26 March 2026. Blue Trust Construction Ltd, standing inactive, a construction company paid to feed prisoners, received N31,800,006.88 for FCT ration on 27 March 2026 and N75,566,044.13 for Lagos ration on 8 April 2026. Its Katsina payment of N83,100,463.50 was made on 31 December 2025. Fowomaje Heritage Brothers, standing inactive, was paid for Kebbi ration in 2026, N10,431,429.28 on 26 February and N13,053,465.19 on 27 March. The Enugu, Oyo and Nasarawa payments in its name were made in December 2025, for October rations. The names did not change at the year boundary. Neither did their register positions.
New names, same register problems
On 27 March 2026, Chene Systems and Services received N69,549,480 for Lagos ration for February 2026. The company was registered in 2020 and stands inactive on the register. On 25 February 2026, Dominic Edet Okon and Company, a business name registered in 2015 and standing inactive, was paid N26,480,565 under a description that reads payment of January ration and gas to Akwa Ibom 2025, a payment made in 2026 carrying a 2025 description on its face. On 9 April 2026, S-Jay Creative Ltd, standing inactive, collected N35,955,900 for Plateau ration. The same day, K3G Nigeria Enterprises Ilorin received exactly N10,000,000 for preventive health materials, a round sum with no itemisation behind it in the record. No registration record stands under that exact name, with its Ilorin suffix; the register holds a company of nearly the same name, K3G Nigeria Enterprises, registration number RC 2564303, registered on 20 December 2017 and standing inactive.
One bill, three payments
The splitting habit crossed the year boundary too. On 27 March 2026, Galozawa Enterprises, a company registered on 16 August 2021 with registration number RC 3447929 and standing inactive on the register, received three payments on the same day, each carrying the identical description, payment for ration and gas Kebbi Feb 2026: N35,816,940.00, N5,412,156.75 and N5,510,974.22, totalling N46,740,070.97. As a single award, that sum belonged above the Controller-General’s own approval line for goods, which the thresholds in force since May 2025 set below N25 million. Split into three, two of its parts fall beneath that line. Section 58(4)(d) of the Public Procurement Act 2007 makes it an offence to split a procurement to evade approval thresholds, and the record shows one month’s ration and gas for one state divided into three same-day payments for no stated reason.
What the Service told the House
In February 2026, Nwakuche appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Reformatory Institutions and told the lawmakers the Service spent N27.28 billion on feeding in 2025 and still carried N10.75 billion in outstanding food-ration liabilities. His own estimates for 2026 priced feeding at the approved higher rate. The payment records for the months that followed show settlements still running through the same vendor ecosystem, at the same descriptions, with the same register problems the year before had carried.
The panel had already named the pattern
The Independent Investigative Panel on Allegations of Corruption and Gross Violations Against the Nigerian Correctional Service, set up by the Minister of Interior and inaugurated on 30 September 2024 under the chairmanship of Dr Magdalene Ajani, inspected 86 custodial centres across 23 states and the Federal Capital Territory. Its final report, dated March 2026 and presented on 3 June 2026, found that most of the food-supply companies awarded feeding contracts “are fronts for past and current senior correctional officers, politicians, high-level public officers, or their friends and relatives”. The panel found main contractors subcontracting the feeding itself to officers-in-charge at N460 per inmate per day against the official rate, diluting the food by up to half, and found feeding contracts inflated 30 to 50 percent above market prices. It found a uniform production concession worth about N1.7 billion a year performing below 10 percent, and it recorded periodic remittances of welfare funds to the Office of the Controller-General. The panel’s fieldwork overlapped Nwakuche’s tenure from December 2024, and its report names no recipient of any specific remittance. It recommended that cases carrying prima facie evidence of criminal conduct be referred to the Police, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission.
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