By The voucher carries one line and nothing else. On 17 September 2025, the Federal Ministry of Livestock Development paid N8,940,000,000 to Osas and Oseji, and the payment record, number 1001324085-1, describes the entire transaction in nine words: Being Payment for the Procurement of a multipurpose Office Complex/Building. A SecretsReporters investigation of the ministry’s payment records shows that the record carries no address for the building, no plot or title reference, no contract number, no valuation reference and no indication whether the N8.94 billion is the full price or a part payment.
The ministry is one of the youngest in the federation. President Bola Tinubu created the Federal Ministry of Livestock Development on 9 July 2024, Idi Mukhtar Maiha was sworn in as its first minister on 4 November 2024, and the Permanent Secretary, Dr Chinyere Ijeoma Akujobi, the ministry’s chief accounting officer, was already in office when the ministry’s payment ledger opened. Every payment in that ledger was made under the authority of the two of them.
The ledger is a short one. From its first payment on 29 July 2025 to its last on 13 May 2026, the ministry made 32 payments totalling N9,872,925,368.05. The single payment to Osas and Oseji accounts for 90.55 percent of every kobo the ministry has paid out on the record.
The payee is not a construction company and not a property developer. Osas and Oseji is a firm of estate surveyors and valuers whose own material names Osas D. Aigbekaen as founding partner in Abuja and Hyacinth Oseji as principal partner in Port Harcourt. On the Corporate Affairs Commission register, Osas and Oseji, RC 2029697, was registered on 13 May 2007 and stands inactive. The payment record does not state whether the firm sold the building, brokered its purchase or valued it, and no document in the public record produced by the ministry identifies the building, its location, its former owner or the valuation on which N8.94 billion was fixed.
The public plan for housing this ministry pointed in a different direction entirely. In September 2024, President Tinubu directed the Federal Capital Territory Administration to refurbish the former headquarters of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security in the Central Business District and hand it to the new ministry, and the FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, inspected the building on 25 September 2024 as an emergency work. At its 2025 budget defence, the ministry told the National Assembly it was being accommodated in the office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation while discussions held with the FCT Minister to secure a permanent office, and that it had requested N10 billion as capital and N1.8 billion as overhead for 2025, a total of N11.8 billion it described as inadequate for take-off. The payment to Osas and Oseji is 89.4 percent of the entire capital sum the ministry told lawmakers it had requested for the whole of 2025.
Five months after the payment, on 20 February 2026, Maiha stood before the same joint committee of the National Assembly and stated that of the N70 billion approved as the ministry’s take-off fund only N20 billion had been released, and that the N10 billion appropriated as the 2025 capital vote has not been released. The ministry’s own payment records show N9,290,422,432 leaving the ledger during 2025, with N8.94 billion of it spent on a capital asset. The records do not state which fund the building was paid from.
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