BudgIT Tracka Flags Imo, Lagos, Others Among States with Fraudulent Project Delivery
- BudgIT Tracka identified five states as top states for fraudulent project delivery in the 2024 budget
- The five states accounted for more than half of all fraudulently delivered projects tracked nationwide
- BudgIT Tracka identified weak oversight and procurement enforcement as major challenges
Oluwatobi Odeyinka is a business editor at Legit.ng, covering energy, the money market, technology and macroeconomic trends in Nigeria.
A new assessment by Tracka, the civic monitoring platform of BudgIT, has identified Imo, Lagos, Kwara, Abia and Ogun as the states with the highest number of fraudulently delivered projects under Nigeria’s 2024 federal government budget.
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The findings, as reported by Business Day, contained in Tracka’s 2024/2025 report titled The People and Government Oversight: Connecting the Dots in Service Delivery, raised concerns about procurement practices and weak oversight in the execution of federally funded capital projects.
According to Tracka, fraudulently delivered projects include cases involving diversion of funds, projects reported as completed despite being executed in previous budget cycles, and projects delivered at standards far below what was approved and funded.
Breakdown of states with highest fraud rates
The report showed that Imo state recorded the highest fraud rate at 17.43%. Lagos followed with 12.73%, while Kwara recorded 11.76%. Abia and Ogun states posted fraud rates of 10.67% and 8.33%, respectively.
Collectively, the five states accounted for 57.1% of all fraudulently delivered projects tracked nationwide. This represented N8.61 billion out of the N15.07 billion disbursed for projects classified under this category during the 2024 budget cycle.
Tracka explained that the analysis covered 2,760 capital projects across 30 states, linked to the N10.8 trillion capital component of the N34 trillion 2024 national budget.
Oversight gaps persist despite budget disclosures
In the report, Tracka warned that making budget data public has not automatically resulted in accountability, noting a persistent gap between allocations and what citizens experience on the ground.
Speaking on the findings, the head of Tracka, Joshua Osiyemi, said the scale of fraudulent delivery reflects systemic weaknesses in procurement enforcement and monitoring. He said many projects listed as executed either exist only on paper, are recycled from earlier budgets, or are delivered below acceptable standards.
A closer look at individual states revealed different patterns behind the figures. In Imo state, Tracka tracked 109 projects valued at N5.70 billion and identified 19 as fraudulently delivered. Lagos recorded 14 fraudulent projects out of 110 tracked, a result the report described as evidence of governance risks despite the state’s strong fiscal position and over N1.26 trillion in internally generated revenue in 2024.
Kwara state had 12 fraudulently delivered projects out of 102 tracked, which Tracka said raised concerns about contractor accountability. Abia recorded eight fraudulent cases among 75 projects, while Ogun completed the top five.
Call for stronger accountability measures
Tracka stressed that the challenge goes beyond the availability of funds, pointing instead to how projects are executed and verified. Osiyemi said effective oversight must follow public spending from legislative approval through to tangible outcomes in communities.
The report also cited weak legislative scrutiny, limited real-time audits and restricted access to treasury data as factors enabling irregularities. Tracka noted that since January 2025, access to key information, including release data from the Office of the Accountant-General, has become more limited, making independent verification harder.
To address these gaps, Tracka said it engaged ministries, departments and agencies through over 1,200 letters, worked with anti-corruption agencies such as the EFCC and ICPC, and organised hundreds of town hall meetings across local government areas to support citizen-led project validation.
Tracka called for stricter sanctions against contractors involved in fraudulent delivery, stronger procurement controls and improved transparency around budget releases. It warned that without these reforms, reported completion figures would continue to mask deeper failures in service delivery.
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FG disburses N2.45trn to states for infrastructure
Legit.ng earlier reported that state governments and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) received a total of N2.45 trillion from the federal government between March 2024 and August 2025 to support infrastructure development and security interventions.
According to internal documents from the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation (OAGF), the funds were disbursed over 17 months under a special intervention programme financed through non-oil revenue savings.
However, despite the scale of the intervention, concerns have continued to grow over how the funds are being used by state governments.
Proofreading by Funmilayo Aremu, copy editor at Legit.ng.
Source: Legit.ng
