Paid For, Never Built: How Abandonment Became Nigeria’s Cheapest Contract -By Stephen Sunday Laabes

Somewhere in this country right now, a building stands half finished, roofed but not wired, walled but not floored, with grass growing through what was meant to be a doorway. It could be a housing estate, a primary health centre, a skills acquisition workshop, a school block. It does not matter which. What matters is that money was released for it, a contractor was paid, a commissioning date was announced with a governor or a minister cutting a ribbon or laying a foundation stone, and then the structure was left to the weather. Anyone who has driven along a state highway in this country long enough has passed one of these without noticing, because they have stopped registering as strange. They have become as ordinary a sight on a Nigerian road trip as potholes and roadside markets.

This is not an accident that happens once. It is a pattern with its own quiet machinery, and the machinery works the same way regardless of which agency or administration is running it. A project is conceived, usually in response to a real need, a housing deficit, a health gap, a destroyed community waiting to be rebuilt. Funds are appropriated. A contract is awarded, sometimes to a firm with no visible capacity to execute it. A mobilization fee, often as much as a quarter of the total contract sum, is paid upfront so the contractor can procure materials and mobilize equipment to site. Work begins, visibly enough for a photograph. Then it slows, or stops, and the story quietly leaves the news cycle until an auditor, a petition, or a journalist revives it years later.

The scale of this is not a matter of guesswork or anecdote. In 2011, President Goodluck Jonathan set up the Presidential Projects Assessment Committee to survey the country and count what was actually out there. The committee, led by Ibrahim Bunu, visited all 36 states and came back with a number that has since become a kind of grim shorthand in Nigerian public life: 11,886 abandoned federal and state government projects, which it estimated would cost 7.78 trillion naira to complete. The committee’s finding that stuck with fewer people, because it is less quotable but more damning, was that about 63 percent of every public project undertaken in Nigeria since independence in 1960 had ended up abandoned or incomplete, and that even the minority of projects that were finished tended to run about 40 percent over their original cost and still under-deliver on what they promised by roughly 10 percent. Nasir el Rufai, writing about the report at the time, did the arithmetic that nobody in government seemed willing to do out loud: at 1.5 trillion naira a year, with no new contracts awarded and no cost overruns, it would take more than five years just to finish what had already been started.

That committee’s own history illustrates the second half of the problem. It was not the first of its kind. President Olusegun Obasanjo had set up a Presidential Implementation Committee in 2000 with a similar mandate to monitor abandoned projects, and by the time lawmakers were still citing it a quarter of a century later, in a House of Representatives debate in November 2025, that committee had never submitted an official report. The 2025 debate, moved by Kingsley Chinda representing Rivers State, cited a 2021 survey by the Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors putting the number of abandoned federal properties and buildings at roughly 11,866, worth an estimated 20 trillion naira, and named specific structures that have sat unfinished long enough to become landmarks in their own right: the Ajaokuta Steel Complex, the Millennium Tower and Cultural Centre in Abuja, the Federal Secretariat Complex in Ikoyi, the Nigerian International Hotel in Suleja, the NIPOST headquarters in Abuja, the FIRS headquarters in Abia State, the Nigerian Newsprint Manufacturing Company in Kaduna, and livestock and milk processing centres in Adamawa and Taraba. A year earlier, in May 2024, the Senate had gone through the same motion, almost literally, when Jimoh Ibrahim of Ondo South moved for an ad hoc committee to investigate 11,866 abandoned mega projects and repeated the same 63 percent figure from the 2011 report, thirteen years on, as though it were new information.

What that repetition tells you is that counting is not the bottleneck. Nigeria has counted this problem at least three times in twenty five years, under three different presidents, and produced almost identical numbers each time, adjusted only for inflation and the passage of more contract cycles. What has never followed any of those counts is a mechanism that stops the next 11,886 projects from joining the list.

What makes the pattern durable rather than incidental is that abandonment itself can be profitable for the people executing it, even when it is a catastrophe for everyone else. A contractor who collects a mobilization fee and disappears, or who does just enough visible work to avoid the appearance of outright fraud, has already been paid for a project that technically never has to finish. There is rarely a public register showing which contracts were fully disbursed against which completed milestones, so the gap between money spent and work delivered stays invisible to the people who funded it, the taxpayers, and in many of these cases, international donors underwriting reconstruction and development funds meant for the most vulnerable. A new administration arriving in office adds its own version of the same incentive. Completing a predecessor’s project carries little political credit, since ribbon-cutting rewards new announcements, not old ones finally finished, and revalidating or re-awarding a stalled contract at a higher price is often more attractive to everyone involved in the transaction than simply pushing the original contractor to finish at the original price.

The pattern shows up differently depending on the sector, but the underlying logic does not change. In housing, government-backed estates are announced with population figures, a housing deficit statistic, and a promise of affordability, and the trouble tends to surface later, in the gap between units commissioned on paper and units a family can actually move into with functioning plumbing and a title document. Nigeria’s housing deficit is commonly put at around 20 million units, a number invoked in nearly every new housing announcement, federal or state, precisely because it is large enough to justify almost any project regardless of whether the agency proposing it has ever finished one before. In healthcare, primary health centres built or renovated under one national initiative or another sit without equipment, without staff quarters, or without the borehole and generator that were part of the original scope, so a structure exists that the ministry can photograph and a community still cannot use. In skills acquisition, training centres are commissioned with fanfare about youth employment and then never receive the tools, generators, or instructors that would let a single graduate leave with a certificate that means anything. None of this requires malice at every step. It requires only that nobody along the chain, from budget office to procurement desk to site engineer, bears a personal cost for a project that quietly stalls.

There is also a quieter procurement habit that keeps the numbers moving without any single project ever officially closing. Large contracts routinely grow through variation orders, additional sums approved after the original award to cover a change in scope or a cost increase, and each variation resets the clock on when the project is supposed to be finished without necessarily triggering the same scrutiny the original award received. A stalled project can also be revalidated in a fresh budget cycle under a new vote line, which lets an agency report it as an active, funded item again even though the physical structure on the ground has not moved in years. Neither practice is illegal on its own. Together they mean that a project can appear, on paper, to be perpetually in progress, funded again and again, while never actually reaching the point where anyone has to explain why it did not finish the first time.

The human cost of this sits with the people the project was supposed to serve, and it compounds quietly, off any ledger anyone is required to keep. A family waiting for a housing allocation stays in a camp or keeps paying rent it cannot afford, sometimes for years past the date it was told the keys would be ready. A community without a functioning clinic keeps sending pregnant women on longer journeys to the nearest working facility, a distance that in parts of the north can mean the difference between a survivable delivery and a fatal one. A cohort of young people trained for a skills centre that never opens goes back to unemployment carrying nothing but the memory of a groundbreaking ceremony they once believed in. None of this shows up in the ministry’s annual report, because the report measures money spent and photographs taken, not lives changed. A budget line marked as disbursed looks identical whether the building behind it is full of patients or full of weeds.

Nigeria has the institutions on paper to catch this, and it is worth being precise about what each one actually does and where it stops. The Auditor General’s office produces reports every year listing unaccounted funds and unfinished projects across federal agencies, reports that receive brief news coverage each time they are tabled and then largely disappear without consequence, because the office has the power to flag irregularities but not to prosecute or compel repayment on its own. The Public Accounts Committees in the National Assembly have the power to summon accounting officers and demand explanations, and occasionally do, though the follow-through rarely reaches sanction, and a committee’s own report can sit unimplemented the same way the projects it investigates sit unfinished. Anticorruption agencies open investigations into abandoned project petitions, and these can run for years before producing a public outcome, if they produce one at all. The clearest recent illustration is the Niger Delta Development Commission. In 2020, a National Assembly probe examined roughly 40 billion naira in questioned commission spending, while the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission ran a parallel investigation into the commission’s then acting managing director and the supervising minister over dealings put at 81.5 billion naira. The case dominated the press for months, produced a forensic audit, and forced resignations. What it did not produce, in public view at least, was a project-by-project account connecting that money to a list of specific abandoned structures across the Niger Delta that the funds were meant to complete. The institutions can establish that money went missing. They are far less equipped to establish, in a form any resident can check for themselves, which building down the road that missing money was supposed to become.

Civil society has tried to build the missing piece from outside government, and its experience is instructive about both what is possible and what is still missing. BudgIT, a Lagos-based civic technology organisation, runs a platform called Tracka that sends project tracking officers to physically visit constituency and capital projects across the country and report what they actually find on the ground. Between January 2020 and June 2021, Tracka tracked 3,265 government projects across 32 states. Of those, 1,308 were completed, 427 were ongoing, 643 had not started at all despite being funded, 133 were confirmed abandoned, and 774 could not even be located because the project descriptions in the budget did not specify where they were supposed to be. That last category is worth sitting with. Nearly a quarter of the projects in that sample were budgeted for, presumably paid for in some measure, and untraceable to any physical location by a team specifically trying to find them. Earlier Tracka reports found much the same story going back years, with only 33 percent of tracked 2015 constituency projects completed and 40.3 percent of 2016 projects completed, the rest split between projects that were ongoing, unexecuted, or simply unlocatable. A more recent Tracka analysis of the 2024 federal budget flagged Imo, Lagos, Kwara, Abia, and Ogun states as having the highest rates of what it termed fraudulently delivered projects, meaning funds disbursed for work that was either never done, already completed in an earlier budget cycle and paid for twice, or executed so far below specification that the result barely resembled what was contracted.

Tracka is close to what a real solution looks like, and its limits show exactly what is still missing. It can tell you, credibly, whether a physical structure exists at a claimed location and roughly what state it is in. What it cannot do, because no law compels any agency to hand the information over, is connect that physical finding to the underlying financial record: the exact contract sum, the exact amount actually disbursed against it, the dates of each tranche, and the names of the officials who signed off on each one. A civic organisation with volunteer project tracking officers can walk a road and confirm a health centre is an empty shell. It cannot subpoena a ministry’s payment vouchers. That gap between what a citizen group can observe and what only government holds is precisely the gap that lets abandonment stay profitable and unaccountable at the same time.

The fix, in other words, is not another audit report nobody reads, and it is not simply more citizen monitoring layered on top of the monitoring that already exists. It is a public, searchable record, maintained independently of the agencies being tracked, that fuses the two halves of the picture that currently sit in separate hands. On one side would be what Tracka and organisations like it already do well: verified, dated, photographed physical status for every capital project above a reasonable threshold. On the other would be what only the Bureau of Public Procurement, the Office of the Accountant General, and the individual spending agencies currently hold and rarely release in usable form: the contract sum, the amount actually disbursed against each milestone, the identity of the contractor, and the name and title of every official who authorized each payment. Nigeria’s Freedom of Information Act, in force since 2011, technically entitles any citizen to request most of this. In practice, agencies routinely ignore or slow-walk FOI requests past any point of usefulness, and there is no standing penalty that makes compliance cheaper than refusal. Making the register work would mean giving it either statutory teeth, so that procurement and disbursement data must be published as a matter of routine rather than surrendered only under request, or attaching it to an existing oversight body with the standing to compel disclosure, such as the Auditor General’s office, and funding that office to publish machine-readable data rather than the long, static PDF reports it currently produces once a year.

Journalists, community associations, and ordinary residents living near these sites already know which structures are standing empty. That knowledge is not the scarce resource. What they lack is the paper trail connecting a specific abandoned building to a specific signature that authorized payment for it, the link that would let a Tracka field visit and a ministry disbursement record be read side by side by anyone with an internet connection, not filed separately in a civic organisation’s database on one end and a government archive nobody can access on the other. Until that connection is made public and routine, three presidential-level counts in twenty five years will keep producing the same devastating number, adjusted only for inflation, and the buildings will keep standing exactly where the last contractor left them, waiting for nobody.