The Tinubu administration has admitted to the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project that it holds no records of the local contractors, subcontractors, consultants, and vendors who received payments under the $460 million National Public Security Communication System project in Abuja — a sprawling surveillance initiative that was supposed to blanket the capital with CCTV cameras and emergency response infrastructure but whose financial trail has long defied public scrutiny.
That admission matters to far more than lawyers and civil society organisations. The $460 million — drawn from public funds in a country where roughly 133 million people live in multidimensional poverty — was spent on a project whose core beneficiaries, at the contracting level, the government now says it cannot name. For residents of the Federal Capital Territory, who were promised a safer, more surveilled city, the disclosure raises a harder question: what exactly was delivered, and to whom did the money flow?
SERAP has written to Taiwo Oyedele, the Minister of Finance and Co-ordinating Minister of the Economy, demanding the immediate disclosure of all entities that benefited from the project's payments. The organisation invoked Nigeria's Freedom of Information Act and international anti-corruption obligations, arguing that the public has a legal and constitutional right to know how a contract of this scale — one of the largest public security expenditures in Abuja's history — was disbursed across local business interests.
The NPSCS project has been a source of controversy since it was first awarded during the Jonathan administration, with the Chinese firm ZTE Corporation as the primary contractor. Successive governments expanded its scope and spending without commensurate public accountability. Audit queries, legislative investigations, and civil society pressure have repeatedly failed to produce a clear, itemised account of which Nigerian companies were engaged as subcontractors or consultants, and how much each was paid. The project was meant to install thousands of cameras, build command-and-control centres, and connect emergency services across Abuja — ambitions that were never fully realised on the ground.
The government's response to SERAP — that it simply has no record of local contractors — is not a minor administrative gap. It is, accountability advocates say, the precise mechanism through which procurement corruption is sustained: a primary contract awarded to a foreign firm, local subcontracts quietly distributed, and the paper trail allowed to dissolve. SERAP has warned that the failure to disclose this information violates Nigeria's obligations under the UN Convention Against Corruption, to which Abuja is a signatory, and has threatened to seek judicial enforcement if the minister does not act.
What happens next will test both the Tinubu administration's transparency commitments and the enforceability of Nigeria's FOI regime. If SERAP proceeds to court, a judge could compel disclosure — potentially opening one of the most financially significant surveillance contracts in Nigerian history to public examination. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the National Assembly's public accounts committees could also face renewed pressure to reopen their own inquiries. SERAP has given the minister a defined window to respond before it escalates, and the civil society community will be watching whether the administration treats accountability as an obligation or an inconvenience.
Until someone names who collected the money, $460 million spent to make Abuja safer remains a sum the public paid and a story only a few insiders can tell.
