By A SecretsReporters audit of the official payment records of the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure establishes that N22.31 billion paid out under Khalil Suleiman Halilu, the Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer appointed by President Bola Tinubu on 1 September 2023, cannot be tied to any project, plant, property or facility that the public record can locate. The money went to an electric vehicle programme with no plant, a rifle venture with no line, a property purchase with no property on any public record, and two companies with no announced project between them.
The electric vehicle programme carries the largest single gap. On 21 October 2024, the agency paid N5 billion into its own Naira transit account, the payment record describing the money as a partial payment to Dong Feng Motors and Shanghai Launch Automotive Technology as part of an Electric Vehicle supply agreement. The same day, it paid N1.674 billion into the same account, described as payment for technical service for the agency’s local electric vehicle assembly plant project to Shanghai Launch Automotive Technology Co. Ltd. Of the supply agreement the first record names, no public record was located: no announcement, no contract notice, no statement by the agency or by either company. What the public record holds is older and thinner, an October 2023 memorandum of understanding with Shanghai Launch for a new energy automobile facility and a letter of intent from DongFeng Vehicles on vehicle design and production, and neither document mentions any supply agreement or any payment.
Two years after the payments, the plant they were made for remains a sentence in the agency’s own publicity. In its three-year scorecard of September 2026, the agency said: “In the mobility sector, NASENI is developing an electric vehicle assembly facility at the Abuja Technology Village to support the production of electric vehicles, including the NASENI Electric Keke.” Nigeria’s first electric vehicle plant, meanwhile, belongs to private hands: Saglev Micromobility, a Stallion Group joint venture, assembles electric vans in Lagos from Dongfeng-supplied kits. The foreign name on the agency’s payment record supplies the kits for the private plant that exists, while the public plant the agency paid towards is still being developed.
A public payment of this size resting on an agreement no public record holds sits squarely in the territory of the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act 2000, which criminalises the corrupt enrichment of public officers and those acting with them.
On 2 December 2024, the agency paid Securinex Limited N1.73 billion in a single payment, the record describing it as payment for a joint venture on AK-47 refurbishment and defence technology transfer. Securinex is a real company on the corporate register, incorporated in November 2014 and active, with its address at Area 11, Garki, Abuja. Of the venture it was paid for, no public record was located: no announcement by the agency, no report in the press, no record of any AK-47 refurbishment line anywhere in Nigeria. The agency’s documented defence work runs elsewhere, through a facility it jointly operates with the Department of State Services for the manufacture of security equipment and through its defence partnership with the Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria, and neither record names Securinex or any rifle line.
Between June and November 2025, the agency paid Bethel Aluminium Extrusions Limited N2.73 billion in six part-payments, every one of them described in the records as payment for the purchase of land and building at Plot 940, Number 15 M.S. Haruna Avenue, in Cadastral Zone C16 at Idu, Karmo, Abuja. The corporate register carries the payee’s name with a one-letter difference, Bethel Aluminium Extrosions Limited, RC 467293, on the register since 2002. No public record was located that mentions the agency acquiring Plot 940, or any property transaction between the agency and Bethel at all. The N2.73 billion rests on the payment records alone.
A property purchase of this size with no property on any public record is exactly the kind of unexplained application of public funds the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission Establishment Act 2004 empowers investigators to pursue.
The two largest payees in this pattern have no project footprint at all. Manufacturing and Technology Solutions Nig Limited took N8.06 billion in twenty payments between October and December 2024, for the procurement, assemblage and installation of equipment and machineries at the agency’s headquarters, in phases the records number one to four. Machine and Equipment Corporation Africa Limited took N3.12 billion in three payments between October 2023 and October 2024 as a revolving fund for national assets recovery and tractor recovery and redeployment, a company whose own register entry lists the agency itself among its officers and one of whose payments the record describes as the agency’s equity contribution as a shareholder in the corporation. Between them the two companies absorbed N11.18 billion, and no public record was located that ties either one to any announced project, factory or facility of the agency.
Other promises have slipped their dates in silence. The agency’s coal and liquid fertiliser plants in Kano were, in the words of its own project partner in February 2026, to commence production “by May or June 2026”; that deadline passed, and as at the end of October 2026 no commissioning or production report was located. The Ekopanelly eco-panel project carries a signed franchise agreement dating to June 2022 and, in August and September 2026, a public relaunch, but no operating plant was located; the agency paid N5.84 billion towards that project in October 2024, a sum that stands outside the total counted in this report.
The agency can point to real output elsewhere on its record: a diagnostics factory at Idu that outside academics have toured, commissioned compressed natural gas centres, a working tractor institute. None of it answers for the money in this report. The absence of a located record is not proof that a project does not exist. It is, however, the whole of what the public holds, and on the record as it stands the agency paid for an electric vehicle plant it is still developing, a rifle venture no record names, a property no record shows it acquiring, and two companies no record connects to a single announced project. Over every one of those payments stood Khalil Suleiman Halilu.
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