ReportsNG
Nigeria’s Presidency spent ₦4,662,275,541.76 in 2025 keeping State House running — the Villa at Aso Rock, the Vice President’s residence at Aguda House, the President’s travel, and the honorariums and hospitality that come with the office.
Payment records reviewed by ReportsNG shows that for ₦4,181,187,217.06 of that money which is nearly 90 kobo of every naira the Presidency spent last year – the official record does not say who received it. It says only that the money went to something called the “State House HQTRS Transit Account,” an internal holding line, and left it there.
Seventeen payments totalling ₦1,626,723,825.82 are recorded only as “presidential trips and other related expenses” without destination, no traveller list, no distinction between one trip and the next. A further ₦958,066,319.20 across four payments bought air tickets with no travel agency named anywhere in the transaction, more than four times the ₦226,064,224.05 the Presidency paid the same year to an actual, named company, Overland Travels and Tours Limited, for the identical category of spending, proving the Presidency is entirely capable of naming its travel agents when it chooses to.
Another ₦649,800,052.19 across seven payments purchased foreign exchange with no bank or bureau de change named. ₦347,603,312.00 kept the Main House and Aguda running, paid out every month to nobody the records will name. And ₦235,507,720.00 went out as “presidential honorarium” in exactly two payments eleven weeks apart with ₦191,214,720.00 paid out in July, then ₦44,293,000.00 in October, a more than four-fold swing between the two, with no explanation anywhere of who received either sum or what formula, if any, produced them.
The pattern gets more damning the closer you look, because in several cases the Presidency’s own paperwork proves it knows exactly who it is paying and files the payment under the anonymous account anyway. A ₦51,000,000.00 tenancy renewal is described, in State House’s own words, as payment “in favour of Raji Adewale and Associates” yet Raji Adewale and Associates does not appear as the beneficiary of that payment; the transit account does. A ₦25,669,193.00 water bill is described as final settlement to the FCT Water Board but the FCT Water Board is nowhere in the beneficiary column. An ₦18,853,773.59 hotel bill names Transcorp Hotels Plc in its own description and records the transit account as the recipient regardless. If State House can write the true recipient’s name into a description field, there is no operational reason it cannot write that same name into the field that actually identifies who got paid which means the gap is a choice, not a limitation of the accounting system, and it is precisely the kind of gap the Financial Regulations of the Federal Government of Nigeria were written to close: every payment voucher is required to carry full, distinguishing particulars of the true beneficiary of public money, not merely the internal account it passed through on the way there.
On a single day, 24 December 2025, the Presidency recorded ₦1,184,127,350.30 in air ticket purchases across five separate payments, more than a billion naira for flights, one day, no itineraries attached to any of it. That came on top of two enormous lump-sum releases earlier in the year, ₦400,000,000.00 in October and ₦350,000,000.00 in July, both simply labelled a “fund release for the provision of presidential trips and other related expenses,” together adding up to ₦2.6 billion that the public record cannot currently match to a single flight, hotel room, or motorcade the President or his office actually used.
Two of the year’s few transparently-documented contracts stand out precisely because of that contrast: ₦120,616,766.10 paid to MKW Consultants Limited to renovate a villa property on Ibrahim Taiwa Street in Asokoro, and ₦43,950,771.60 paid to Citarc Ltd to build a portacabin at State House, both citing a specific procurement approval reference, a proof that when the Presidency wants to keep a proper record, it knows exactly how. It simply didn’t, for nine-tenths of what it spent in 2025.
