ReportsNG
For months, Nigerians were told the National Population Commission was preparing for a census the country desperately needed. What they were not told, according to federal spending records, was that the same commission was quietly paying for office furniture that did not exist.
In this final installment of a three-part investigation into the Commission’s 2023 Service-Wide Fund audit, ReportsNG can reveal that ₦71,000,000 was paid for office furniture allegedly purchased by a staff member furniture that government inspectors went looking for and could not find.
The finding, buried among seventeen separate irregularities totalling ₦26.7 billion, paints a picture of an agency where public funds moved out of the door with little to show for it, not even a chair, a desk or a filing cabinet.
According to the findings, ₦408 million was allegedly diverted through Commission staff under the guise of procuring boat and car hire services. Investigators concluded that the transport services were used to cover a label attached to money that flowed out of the Commission’s accounts to individual staff members rather than to any genuine hire company actually providing the service.
A staggering ₦3.19 billion sat as unretired cash advances and excessive grants of cash advances combined the single largest finding across all three parts of this series. In plain terms, money was handed out and never properly accounted for.
A further ₦231.5 million was paid for overseas travels and conferences that lacked proper approval, on top of another ₦171.4 million in international travel also paid without approval. Another ₦24 million covered a foreign course fee for a staff member with no approval on record.
The findings also show ₦69 million in payments that violated the Federal Government’s e-payment policy, ₦60.5 million spent on external solicitors without the mandatory approval of the Attorney-General of the Federation, and ₦22 million paid to a consultant under an unauthorised arrangement.
Throughout the entire period covered by these findings January to December 2023 the Commission was led by Hon. Nasir Isa Kwarra, who served as Chairman until his tenure concluded on 28 October 2025. Hon. Muhammad Usman Dattijo later stepped in as Acting Chairman before a substantive successor was appointed.
As Chairman for the full audited year, Kwarra’s administration bears direct responsibility for the failures documented across all three parts of this investigation: the unverifiable Special Fund Account, the procurement breaches, and now the cash, travel and asset-verification scandals detailed in this final report.
Across all three reports, ReportsNG has documented ₦26,719,392,635.39 in irregularities spanning seventeen separate findings, the largest sum uncovered at any single institution in the 2023 report.
