ReportsNG
The University of Lagos (UNILAG) carries the weight of being one of Nigeria’s most prestigious institutions, a first-choice destination for hundreds of thousands of prospective students every admission season.
A Federal Government team that investigated UNILAG’s 2024 financial year found N22,145,701,052.88 in irregularities across twenty-five separate findings, the single largest sum uncovered at any institution in the year’s entire federal cycle.
The most damning single finding: N7,828,737,226.27 in contracts were never uploaded onto the Nigeria Open Contracting Portal, the federal government’s own public procurement transparency platform. Nearly N7.83 billion in university spending simply does not exist on the record the public is entitled to check and a contract that never reaches the Open Contracting Portal is a contract Nigerians have no way of scrutinizing, no value, no vendor, no scope, nothing.
Running alongside this is a revenue failure of similar scale. N3,290,139,031.25 reflects internally generated revenue that was never remitted to the Consolidated Revenue Fund, money the university collected but did not hand over as required. A further ₦398,301,002.00 reflects a separate category of independent revenue also never remitted. Combined, close to ₦3.69 billion in university-generated income appears to have stayed outside the Treasury account it was legally required to reach.
Beyond the money itself, federal investigators in books seen by ReportsNG recorded something more troubling still, which is outright denial of access to the university’s own financial records, with no isolated figure attached because the university simply would not let them see what was behind the request.
Professor Folasade Tolulope Ogunsola has served as UNILAG’s 13th Vice-Chancellor since November 2022, spanning the entire 2024 financial year and continuing in a five-year term running through November 2027. As the university’s chief executive and accounting officer, responsibility for a financial environment that hid N7.83 billion in contracts from public view, failed to remit N3.69 billion in collected revenue, and denied auditors access to its own records rests with her administration.
The Public Procurement Act 2007 and the Bureau of Public Procurement’s Open Contracting mandate require every public contract to be uploaded for public visibility, a law violated outright by N7.83 billion. The Financial Regulations 2009 require prompt remittance of internally generated revenue to the Consolidated Revenue Fund again violated by a combined N3.69 billion across two separate revenue findings. And Section 85(2) of the 1999 Constitution guarantees the constitutional federal investigator access to institutional financial records which was violated when UNILAG denied that access outright.
