By TEON Nig Ltd is a company with a Gmail address, no website and an office at No 27E Emeofor Street in Abakaliki. It was registered on 24 February 2024, and on the register of the Corporate Affairs Commission it already stands inactive, RC 7366204. In its first year of existence, that company stood alone in the bidding for four faculty buildings at the ICT University Oferekpe and took every one of them.
The contracts sit in the records of the Ebonyi State Ministry of Tertiary Education, and a SecretsReporters review of the state’s procurement portal shows what the four awards carry. Lots 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the faculty building programme at the ICT University Oferekpe went to TEON at N1,600,000,000 apiece, four separate construction contracts for four separate buildings at the one identical price, a combined N6,400,000,000 to the single company.
On no lot did TEON have to beat another bidder to get there. The tender record the portal keeps for each lot carries a table of the companies that bid, and on Lot 2 the table has one row. On Lot 3 it has one row. On Lot 4 and on Lot 5 it has one row, and every row names the same company, marked opened and awarded. The award criterion printed on each record reads: award to most responsive bid. TEON was the only bid there was to respond.
The prices TEON itself put in were not the price it was paid. Its tender for Lot 2 was N1,610,746,889.64. For Lot 3 it tendered N1,611,829,382.73, for Lot 4 it tendered N1,613,317,667.40, and for Lot 5 it tendered N1,616,040,564.00, four different sums from the same company for four buildings in the same programme. Each award came down from the company’s own figure and landed on precisely the amount the state had budgeted for the lot, identical to the kobo on all four.
The four lots are part of a wider pattern in the same programme. The faculty building scheme was cut into twelve lots across the ICT University and Ebonyi State University, and every lot in it, for different buildings at two different institutions, carries the same price as TEON’s, a programme of N19,200,000,000 priced in identical units. The twelve tender records were released on 8 November 2024 within nine minutes of one another. Eight of the lots went one or two apiece to seven other companies. TEON’s four make it the largest single holder in the programme, with a third of the whole scheme, collected before the company was a year old.
The Public Procurement Act 2007 builds public contracting on competition: Section 16 makes open competitive bidding the foundation of procurement, Section 24 makes it the default method by which contracts are to be awarded, and procurement without competition is confined to narrow exceptions defined in the Act. A sole bid is not a competition that one company won. It is the absence of the contest the Act prescribes, and on these four records the state priced the buildings before it opened the bidding: the sum awarded is the sum budgeted, on every lot, whatever the only bidder asked.
The ownership record behind the company is thin. The register data for TEON names Okemma Emeka Nweze with 35 percent of the company and Nwodom Sunday Isaac with 30 percent, with a further officer’s name withheld behind the register’s paywall.
The portal records the four contracts as active, each for a term of 365 days ending in January 2026.
SecretsReporters sent TEON Nig Ltd its inquiries on the four awards ahead of publication, and the company did not respond.
Get every exclusive first. Follow Secrets Reporters on WhatsApp:
Follow Secrets Reporters on WhatsAppFollow Secrets Reporters on WhatsApp: join the channel for every exclusive the moment it publishes.
