EXCLUSIVE: President Goodluck Jonathan Paid N30 Billion of the Solid Minerals Fund to INEC for the 2015 Elections, N36.43 Billion to the National Security Adviser to Protect 20 Dams and N1.57 Billion as Exit Entitlement for Himself and Vice

The inventory is the report. In 18 pages adopted by the House of Representatives on 28 May 2019, the Ad-hoc Committee on the Utilisation of the N350 Billion Natural Resources Fund set down, payment by payment, what left the Development of Natural Resources Account between 2002 and April 2019. The committee counted N1,063,930,969,642.97 in naira paid out of the account in those 17 years. Of that money, N738,772,008,857.24 and US$3,000,000 went outside the purposes for which the account was created.

President Olusegun Obasanjo created the account in 2002, by an Executive Order issued to the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission. The order named three beneficiary ministries and no others: Mines and Steel Development, Agriculture and Rural Development, and Water Resources. The account was domiciled with the Central Bank of Nigeria, and the motion that sent the committee to work described the fund as a financial window for the development of the solid minerals sector.

The SecretsReporters review of the committee's two inventories shows what the mandate's own share looked like. The three core ministries drew N325,158,960,785.73 between them, and the bulk of it went to agriculture and water, to fertiliser, grain silos, dams and irrigation. The steel industry's receipts within the mandate were the salary arrears and disengagement benefits of a collapsed sector. The Ministry of Mines and Steel Development, the ministry in the fund's own description, appears twice in the whole period. It received N158,300,000 on 6 February 2013, for the lead poisoning emergency in Zamfara, and N10,000,000,000 on 30 June 2017, as the first tranche of a mining intervention. Two entries in 17 years, about one percent of everything the account paid out, for the sector the account existed to build.

The inventories close in April 2019, and they are the outbound half of the sector's story. The inbound half is in the NEITI Solid Minerals Audit 2023, where the sector generated N401,870,000,000 in a single year and no revenue was allocated to any tier of government. The two records cover different years and different money.

Read also: EXCLUSIVE: Henry Dele Alake, Minister of Solid Minerals Development, presides over a sector that refused its own audit, exported without permits and shared no revenue with any tier of government

The largest single road out of the account led back to the Federal Government itself. On 15 May 2007 the account paid N100,000,000,000 to finance the second quarter capital warrant of the 2007 budget. On 1 September 2010 it paid N70,000,000,000 to fund capital budget releases. On 17 August 2012 it paid N80,000,000,000 for third quarter capital expenditure, and on 8 November 2013 it paid N80,000,000,000 again, that time for fourth quarter capital projects, an ASUU obligation and the construction of residences for the principal officers of the National Assembly. The committee held that withdrawals of this kind offended Section 80(4) of the 1999 Constitution, under which no money may be withdrawn from any public fund except in the manner prescribed by the National Assembly, and it held that the procedure by which the account was accessed was alien to the extant laws and the Constitution.

The power sector was paid early. On 6 August 2006, N57,588,085,668.92 went out of the account as monetisation arrears to the staff of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria. On 16 January 2007, N21,000,000,000 passed through PHCN to A.G. Siemens Ltd, for a 471 megawatt power plant at Geregu in Ajaokuta.

Under President Goodluck Jonathan, the account paid for an election and for the guarding of dams. The Independent National Electoral Commission received N10,000,000,000 on 29 August 2014 and N20,000,000,000 on 12 January 2015, both of them for the 2015 elections. On 24 March 2014, the Office of the National Security Adviser received N36,432,423,968.73 for the protection of 20 selected dams.

On 8 October 2014, the account paid N15,000,000,000 to Lucius Nwosu, SAN, as judgement creditor in the Odi matter, the payment the inventory describes as made in respect of genocide at Odi in Kolokuma Local Government Area of Bayelsa State.

On 10 November 2006, the account paid N100,000,000 as a deposit for booking the Transcorp Hilton Hotel in Abuja for the 143rd Extraordinary Meeting of OPEC. On 18 May 2015, the same sum was paid to Vatican City on the Assumpta Science Centre at Ofekata in Owerri, through the Ministry of Science and Technology with the Pontifical Council.

One payment in the inventory was made to the outgoing house itself. On 28 May 2015, one day before he handed over power, the account paid N1,575,250,000 as the entitlement of the outgoing President and Vice President.

The committee did not leave the account at Jonathan's door. It found that since 2002 every President of Nigeria, with the single exception of President Muhammadu Buhari, granted approvals outside the core mandate of the fund, and that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo granted such approvals while Acting President. The inventory's payments of N4,000,000,000 each to Kano State and to Osun State, both dated 21 July 2017, fall inside his acting window. Through every administration, custody of the account sat with the office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, held across the greater part of the period by Ibrahim Dankwambo, Jonah Otunla and Ahmed Idris.

Neither the Bank of Industry nor the Solid Minerals Development Fund appears anywhere in the committee's two inventories, although those are the vehicles through which mining support was publicly said to move in the same years. The committee books the June 2017 tranche as paid to the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development directly. The public record of that season shows an artisanal and small scale miners fund of N5,000,000,000 activated at the Bank of Industry in August 2017, under Minister Kayode Fayemi, half of it matched by the bank. Neither record explains the difference between the tranche the committee booked and the fund the bank announced, and the widely reported US$30,000,000 intervention of late 2016 appears as no payment in either inventory. No public audit traces the mining money from the account to a single mine site.

The committee recommended that the National Assembly put in place all necessary measures to recover the money disbursed outside the mandate and stop further abuse, and that every future withdrawal follow the Executive Order that established the fund. The House adopted the report on 28 May 2019. The recommendations named no individual for sanction or prosecution, set no deadline for the recovery and assigned it to no agency. No recovery has been traced on the public record in the years since, and in December 2023 the 10th Assembly opened the same ground again.

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