Picture the head of a very large household sitting at the head of a very long table.

He is wearing an agbada so vast it could double as a small parachute, embroidered at the collar with gold thread that catches the light each time he leans forward to bless the food.

The cloth is magnificent, the wearer is magnificent.

The occasion, he assures everyone present, is also magnificent. At the far end of the table sit the children, eighteen or so of them, fidgeting on benches, eyes following the steam rising from a single pot of jollof rice that nobody has yet been allowed to touch.

Once a month, a courier arrives at the gate with a heavy envelope. The envelope is placed, with great ceremony, into the inner breast pocket of the agbada, somewhere near the collar. The head of the household nods. The drummers, who appear from nowhere on these occasions, drum.

The wives ululate. The neighbours, peering through the fence, mutter that the family is doing well, very well indeed, may God continue to bless this house.

What the neighbours cannot see, because the embroidery is so dazzling, is that the agbada has pockets. Not one. Not two. Many. And every single one of them has a hole. The envelope, once placed in the breast pocket, begins to leak. A few notes slide into the eldest son’s hand, who tucks some into his own pocket, which also has a hole.

A few more drift into the grandson’s grip on their way past, and the grandson, being a young man with ambitions, sees no reason to pass on what he can keep. By the time anything reaches the hem of the agbada, where the smallest children are waiting with cupped hands, the envelope is no longer an envelope. It is an idea.

The children are not imagining their hunger. The money was real. It is just gone.

Nigeria does not lack money. Between 2023 and 2025, the Federation Account Allocation Committee disbursed in excess of N58 trillion across the three tiers of government of federal, state, and local.

Into 2026, the pace held: FAAC shared N2.036 trillion in March alone, the second time in that year that a single monthly distribution crossed the two-trillion-naira threshold, split between N789.16 billion for the federal government, N657.60 billion for the 36 states, and N468.83 billion for the 774 local government councils.

The money is counted, publicly announced and divided by constitutional formula. The question this article asks is simpler and more disturbing: where does it go?

Nigeria’s fiscal constitution divides the country into three tiers of revenue-sharing, each assigned responsibilities proportional to its proximity to the citizen. The federal government, within the exclusive legislative list, controls defence, foreign policy, monetary architecture and federal infrastructure.

Thirty-six state governments are responsible for concurrent legislative list including secondary schools, secondary healthcare and state roads.

Seven hundred and seventy-four local government areas sit closest to the citizen, constitutionally charged with the residual legislative list which include primary healthcare, primary education and sanitation. Out of the Federation Account flows an allocation formula: roughly 52.68% to the federal government, 26.72% to states, and 20.60% to local governments, plus a 13% derivation bonus for oil-producing states.

The paradox is written into the fiscal records of the states that receive the most. Rivers State received N526.30 billion (approximately $351 million) in full-year 2025 FAAC allocations, ranking second among the 36 states, behind Delta which led outright with N649.67 billion for the full year. Bayelsa, smaller in population than Alimosho Lagos local government, received N488.08 billion ($325 million).

Delta and Akwa Ibom followed closely behind. Yet the NBS and UNDP Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index record Bayelsa’s poverty rate at 88.5%, the second highest in the country, while Rivers sits at 62.4%.

The World Bank’s 2025 projections place 63% of all Nigerians below the national poverty line. A state that receives $325 million in annual federal transfers and returns an 88.5% poverty rate is not a system that is working. It is a system in which money is moving and arriving somewhere, just not at the citizen.

Three specific pockets are identified through which the allocation leaks before it reaches the hem where ordinary citizens wait. Each is documented in budget records, court transcripts, audit reports, and investigative journalism. Each has been the subject of legislative debate, civil society scrutiny, public opinion court and in at least one case a Supreme Court ruling. None has been closed.

The first pocket is the security vote. By 2025, the thirty-two states that disclosed anything had budgeted N210.68 billion (roughly $140 million) for security votes, the sharpest single-year jump in the decade-long history of the line item, up from N164.07 billion in 2024 and N150.47 billion in 2023. Four states, Gombe, Kebbi, Niger and Yobe, published no figure at all.

According to the civil society groups, cumulative three-year security vote spending across the disclosing states reached N525.23 billion, a figure that continues to outpace the national defence budget. Aggregate across all government levels and the annual national total exceeds N980 billion.

The security vote is an executive discretionary fund: not subject to legislative oversight, not audited, not reconciled against verifiable expenditure. An envelope of N525 billion marked ‘security’ and accounted for by no one is, by any reasonable definition, a vault without a key.

The performance review is damning. Nextier’s Nigeria Violent Conflicts Database recorded 1,274 violent incidents in 2025, yielding 4,654 casualties and 3,141 kidnap victims. Banditry alone produced 599 documented incidents, more than double the 256 of 2024, with casualties rising from 1,585 to 2,724.

The Northwest recorded 2,938 kidnapping victims between July 2024 and June 2025. In November 2025, a single month, armed groups abducted 402 schoolchildren across four north-central states. By February 2026, an attack on two Kwara State villages had killed more than 160 people; on 15 May 2026, gunmen entered classrooms in Oyo State gruesomely murdered 2 staff and abducted at least 46 other students, pupils and teachers.

A former EFCC Chairman has alleged that some governors, sadly, have a structural incentive to permit insecurity because a deteriorating environment justifies a larger, unaudited security vote. The security vote, in this reading, is not the solution to the crisis. It may, ironically in part, be one of its sustaining conditions.

The second pocket is the ghost worker payroll. In 2024, the ICPC recovered N20 billion traced to ghost payrolls. In 2025, state-level biometric audits deepened the reckoning as Taraba State found 7,800 names on its payroll but confirmed only 1,410 real employees after biometric screening.

Katsina identified 3,488 ghost workers, saving approximately N453.3 million per month once they were removed. Kano removed 239 ghosts, saving N27 million monthly. Multiplied across thirty-six states, the cumulative payroll leak is not a rounding error. It is a parallel government, employed in perpetuity, drawing salaries from a budget written for teachers, nurses and clerks who actually exist.

The third pocket, the most brazen of the three, is the local government allocation itself. On 11 July 2024, the Supreme Court ordered that council allocations flow directly from the Federation Account, ending the practice of governors intercepting LGA funds. Twelve months later, governors had retained N4.5 trillion of LGA-meant funds.

Anambra State answered the ruling by passing a state law that reproduced the exact practice the apex court had outlawed. Nearly two years on, compliance remains uneven. On December 19, 2025, President Tinubu was compelled to issue a formal directive to the thirty-six governors to comply with the ruling, an instruction directed at a court order already in force, requiring repetition because the order had not been obeyed.

Governors withheld ₦1.46 trillion in local council funds during the first quarter of 2026 alone.

The accountability architecture for subnational spending exists only on paper. State legislatures are captured by the executive; members depend on the governor for constituency project allocations, party tickets and the small mercies of governance. The national press is concentrated in three cities, and long-form investigative reporting at the level of a ward in Yobe is financially impossible for most newsrooms.

Civil society organisations do excellent work but rarely extend their reach beyond state capitals. Unfortunately, the federal government has a structural incentive to look the other way: governors mobilise votes, and a president who polices a governor is deemed to be preparing to lose a state.

The world has already built institutions whose specific purpose is to hold subnational governments accountable for shared revenue. South Africa’s Financial and Fiscal Commission (FFC), established in the 1996 Constitution, provides constitutionally independent advice to all three spheres of government and directly informs the annual Division of Revenue Act.

Brazil’s Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU) operates under the 1988 Constitution with standing to audit, impose fines on public officials, freeze assets and block federal transfers to non-compliant subnational governments.

Nigeria has analogues in the RMAFC and the Auditor-General of the Federation but neither commands the enforcement power, the political independence, or the subnational reporting reach that makes the FFC and the TCU consequential rather than ornamental.

The political economy of reform is the hardest wall in this argument. An institution designed to constrain governors must be legislated by a National Assembly in which many federal legislators owe their seats and party tickets to governors, and then assented to by a President whose coalition depends on those same governors mobilising their states. The people who must create this institution are precisely the people the institution would constrain. This article does not pretend there is a clever workaround.

It names the tension because refusing to lie about a political problem is the first necessary step in solving one. Part Two (the concluding part) of this series will examine what structural reforms could realistically be implemented to stitch the pockets closed and return the allocation to the children who have been cupping their hands at the hem of the agbada for too long.

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Picture the head of a very large household sitting at the head of a very long table.

He is wearing an agbada so vast it could double as a small parachute, embroidered at the collar with gold thread that catches the light each time he leans forward to bless the food.

The cloth is magnificent, the wearer is magnificent.

The occasion, he assures everyone present, is also magnificent. At the far end of the table sit the children, eighteen or so of them, fidgeting on benches, eyes following the steam rising from a single pot of jollof rice that nobody has yet been allowed to touch.

Once a month, a courier arrives at the gate with a heavy envelope. The envelope is placed, with great ceremony, into the inner breast pocket of the agbada, somewhere near the collar. The head of the household nods. The drummers, who appear from nowhere on these occasions, drum.

The wives ululate. The neighbours, peering through the fence, mutter that the family is doing well, very well indeed, may God continue to bless this house.

What the neighbours cannot see, because the embroidery is so dazzling, is that the agbada has pockets. Not one. Not two. Many. And every single one of them has a hole. The envelope, once placed in the breast pocket, begins to leak. A few notes slide into the eldest son’s hand, who tucks some into his own pocket, which also has a hole.

A few more drift into the grandson’s grip on their way past, and the grandson, being a young man with ambitions, sees no reason to pass on what he can keep. By the time anything reaches the hem of the agbada, where the smallest children are waiting with cupped hands, the envelope is no longer an envelope. It is an idea.

The children are not imagining their hunger. The money was real. It is just gone.

Nigeria does not lack money. Between 2023 and 2025, the Federation Account Allocation Committee disbursed in excess of N58 trillion across the three tiers of government of federal, state, and local.

Into 2026, the pace held: FAAC shared N2.036 trillion in March alone, the second time in that year that a single monthly distribution crossed the two-trillion-naira threshold, split between N789.16 billion for the federal government, N657.60 billion for the 36 states, and N468.83 billion for the 774 local government councils.

The money is counted, publicly announced and divided by constitutional formula. The question this article asks is simpler and more disturbing: where does it go?

Nigeria’s fiscal constitution divides the country into three tiers of revenue-sharing, each assigned responsibilities proportional to its proximity to the citizen. The federal government, within the exclusive legislative list, controls defence, foreign policy, monetary architecture and federal infrastructure.

Thirty-six state governments are responsible for concurrent legislative list including secondary schools, secondary healthcare and state roads.

Seven hundred and seventy-four local government areas sit closest to the citizen, constitutionally charged with the residual legislative list which include primary healthcare, primary education and sanitation. Out of the Federation Account flows an allocation formula: roughly 52.68% to the federal government, 26.72% to states, and 20.60% to local governments, plus a 13% derivation bonus for oil-producing states.

The paradox is written into the fiscal records of the states that receive the most. Rivers State received N526.30 billion (approximately $351 million) in full-year 2025 FAAC allocations, ranking second among the 36 states, behind Delta which led outright with N649.67 billion for the full year. Bayelsa, smaller in population than Alimosho Lagos local government, received N488.08 billion ($325 million).

Delta and Akwa Ibom followed closely behind. Yet the NBS and UNDP Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index record Bayelsa’s poverty rate at 88.5%, the second highest in the country, while Rivers sits at 62.4%.

The World Bank’s 2025 projections place 63% of all Nigerians below the national poverty line. A state that receives $325 million in annual federal transfers and returns an 88.5% poverty rate is not a system that is working. It is a system in which money is moving and arriving somewhere, just not at the citizen.

Three specific pockets are identified through which the allocation leaks before it reaches the hem where ordinary citizens wait. Each is documented in budget records, court transcripts, audit reports, and investigative journalism. Each has been the subject of legislative debate, civil society scrutiny, public opinion court and in at least one case a Supreme Court ruling. None has been closed.

The first pocket is the security vote. By 2025, the thirty-two states that disclosed anything had budgeted N210.68 billion (roughly $140 million) for security votes, the sharpest single-year jump in the decade-long history of the line item, up from N164.07 billion in 2024 and N150.47 billion in 2023. Four states, Gombe, Kebbi, Niger and Yobe, published no figure at all.

According to the civil society groups, cumulative three-year security vote spending across the disclosing states reached N525.23 billion, a figure that continues to outpace the national defence budget. Aggregate across all government levels and the annual national total exceeds N980 billion.

The security vote is an executive discretionary fund: not subject to legislative oversight, not audited, not reconciled against verifiable expenditure. An envelope of N525 billion marked ‘security’ and accounted for by no one is, by any reasonable definition, a vault without a key.

The performance review is damning. Nextier’s Nigeria Violent Conflicts Database recorded 1,274 violent incidents in 2025, yielding 4,654 casualties and 3,141 kidnap victims. Banditry alone produced 599 documented incidents, more than double the 256 of 2024, with casualties rising from 1,585 to 2,724.

The Northwest recorded 2,938 kidnapping victims between July 2024 and June 2025. In November 2025, a single month, armed groups abducted 402 schoolchildren across four north-central states. By February 2026, an attack on two Kwara State villages had killed more than 160 people; on 15 May 2026, gunmen entered classrooms in Oyo State gruesomely murdered 2 staff and abducted at least 46 other students, pupils and teachers.

A former EFCC Chairman has alleged that some governors, sadly, have a structural incentive to permit insecurity because a deteriorating environment justifies a larger, unaudited security vote. The security vote, in this reading, is not the solution to the crisis. It may, ironically in part, be one of its sustaining conditions.

The second pocket is the ghost worker payroll. In 2024, the ICPC recovered N20 billion traced to ghost payrolls. In 2025, state-level biometric audits deepened the reckoning as Taraba State found 7,800 names on its payroll but confirmed only 1,410 real employees after biometric screening.

Katsina identified 3,488 ghost workers, saving approximately N453.3 million per month once they were removed. Kano removed 239 ghosts, saving N27 million monthly. Multiplied across thirty-six states, the cumulative payroll leak is not a rounding error. It is a parallel government, employed in perpetuity, drawing salaries from a budget written for teachers, nurses and clerks who actually exist.

The third pocket, the most brazen of the three, is the local government allocation itself. On 11 July 2024, the Supreme Court ordered that council allocations flow directly from the Federation Account, ending the practice of governors intercepting LGA funds. Twelve months later, governors had retained N4.5 trillion of LGA-meant funds.

Anambra State answered the ruling by passing a state law that reproduced the exact practice the apex court had outlawed. Nearly two years on, compliance remains uneven. On December 19, 2025, President Tinubu was compelled to issue a formal directive to the thirty-six governors to comply with the ruling, an instruction directed at a court order already in force, requiring repetition because the order had not been obeyed.

Governors withheld ₦1.46 trillion in local council funds during the first quarter of 2026 alone.

The accountability architecture for subnational spending exists only on paper. State legislatures are captured by the executive; members depend on the governor for constituency project allocations, party tickets and the small mercies of governance. The national press is concentrated in three cities, and long-form investigative reporting at the level of a ward in Yobe is financially impossible for most newsrooms.

Civil society organisations do excellent work but rarely extend their reach beyond state capitals. Unfortunately, the federal government has a structural incentive to look the other way: governors mobilise votes, and a president who polices a governor is deemed to be preparing to lose a state.

The world has already built institutions whose specific purpose is to hold subnational governments accountable for shared revenue. South Africa’s Financial and Fiscal Commission (FFC), established in the 1996 Constitution, provides constitutionally independent advice to all three spheres of government and directly informs the annual Division of Revenue Act.

Brazil’s Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU) operates under the 1988 Constitution with standing to audit, impose fines on public officials, freeze assets and block federal transfers to non-compliant subnational governments.

Nigeria has analogues in the RMAFC and the Auditor-General of the Federation but neither commands the enforcement power, the political independence, or the subnational reporting reach that makes the FFC and the TCU consequential rather than ornamental.

The political economy of reform is the hardest wall in this argument. An institution designed to constrain governors must be legislated by a National Assembly in which many federal legislators owe their seats and party tickets to governors, and then assented to by a President whose coalition depends on those same governors mobilising their states. The people who must create this institution are precisely the people the institution would constrain. This article does not pretend there is a clever workaround.

It names the tension because refusing to lie about a political problem is the first necessary step in solving one. Part Two (the concluding part) of this series will examine what structural reforms could realistically be implemented to stitch the pockets closed and return the allocation to the children who have been cupping their hands at the hem of the agbada for too long.