First, a compliment: to the Lagos State Government for Eko Smart.
If you have not discovered this special gem, this is the moment to do so. It is LASG’s powerful, truly smart digital information tool.
The objective: to bring over 300 essential public services in the state to the fingertips of its citizens. “Everything you need from payments and permits to registrations and public services on a unified digital platform designed to be faster, simpler, and secure,” it says.
It is Lagos, Nigeria’s pre-eminent state, snatching early advantage of AI. Eko Smart is organised, comprehensive, illuminating.
If it involves Lagos State, you can ask any question and receive an immediate response. Begin from your “Citizen’s Dashboard,” as I did, and receive your Citizen ID immediately.
What this means is that you can now perform your citizenship rights and responsibilities wherever you are, and not have to plunge into the notorious traffic.
Eko Smart is not yet available as an app, but you can find it on your browser and search it in your own words. There are some bad links, though, such as https://lasrab.lagosstate.gov.ng/. And no, you cannot locate local police locations, because the police link is, perhaps predictably, broken.
But mostly, this is an excellent, enabling tool. And towards enhancing Eko Smart, anyone can send complaints or suggestions. In an age in which information is life itself, Lagos is now several miles and a few years ahead.
Eko Smart is where every government in Nigeria should be deploying digital technology to empower citizens to access and use information easily.
On the contrary, most governments and their agencies (the police, for instance), live in fear, often because of their own track records. The National Assembly has a paltry archive, perhaps to cover up its distressing inadequacies.
The so-called anti-corruption agencies are often far more noise than substance, pretending that anyone can combat corruption without being accountable.
Consider, for instance, that for almost two months now, DSS has been investigating a breach of INEC’s Continuous Voter Registration Portal!
Similarly, the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission is undertaking a 30-dayinvestigation of the PFIPC scandal, as the entire world now knows: how a nonexistent institution flourished for two years in the federal system, hiring hundreds of staff and securing a N1.3bn luxury spot in the 2026 budget.
And yes, we have a global audience: The Guardian, BBC, France 24, Deutsche Welle Africa, TRK Afrika, Modern Ghana, Inkl Australia, Firstpost India, Washington Examiner.
Last week, ICPC investigators reportedly interviewed Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to President Tinubu and a man with previous ethical issues, who is implicated in this matter.
We wait to see if ICPC can apply the same rigour in the highest of places that it applies to ordinary Nigerians and small operatives or whether it offers political passes.
And we wait to see if the agency can complete this assignment without establishing a thorough understanding of the federal budget and budgeting process, which are a messy jungle. I offer the documents of the Budget Office, dating arbitrarily from 2010 (as if that was the start of the Fourth Republic).
How crazy is this jungle? Some budget years have just a few documents, while others have between 57 and 65. In other words, there is no structure. There are no standards and no methods. That is the path in the jungle where investigators, researchers and citizens are supposed to get lost.
The 2026 budget has two documents: The Bill and the Details. Remember that President Tinubu assented to the budget on April 17. On May 17, FIJ published this report questioning why the details were still unavailable. On June 7, when I wrote this story, they were still not available. It is befuddling to me, then, that both documents are now on the website, dated January 8, 2026.
Maybe ICPC will ask these questions. Maybe it will not. It has the resources; my argument has always been that it does not have the heart.
What might it learn? To establish where we are, the agency must look at several previous budgets. I have. Among others, this is clear: in the 2025 budget documents (the Executive Proposal and the Act), Code 0111062001, and the terms “FOREIGN INTERVENTION” and “PFIPC” do not appear at all. The item only appears in the 2026 Bill, confirming that the PFIPC strategy was a target, not a broader technique.
ICPC must dig deep. For instance, why does the National Council on Climate Change (Code 0111058001) have a budget line in Budgets 2024 and 2026 but is missing from the 2025 documents? How does a statutory body drop out for a year only to quietly reappear? What about agencies and departments?
And what happened to NELFUND (Code 0111061001), which is funded in both 2025 documents but is not in the 2026 Presidency list at all?
Will ICPC notice these? What are the implications? What substantial issue have I not noticed that ICPC might identify, using its considerable resources in forensically examining the budgets of, say, the past five years?
All of this is important because the real reason we are in this bind is the collapse of the oversight responsibilities of the National Assembly, an institution whose decline I lamented in 2022. And it is at a time that Senate President Akpabio is celebrating Nigeria’s descent into the grave of a one-party state, boasting that the opposition in the upper chamber has shrunk to just a handful of Senators.
Implicit in that celebration is the assimilation of the anti-corruption agencies into the bowels of the presidency, for which there is no better example than Akpabio himself, a man whose ethical challenges the EFCC no longer addresses.
In a 2011 report, Corruption on Trial,” Human Rights Watch stressed the structural vulnerability of the EFCC, noting how the agency was deeply susceptible to presidentially-directed prosecution selectivity. The United Nations Convention Against Corruption Coalition, Transparency International, Chatham House, and the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium have all publicly flagged the weaknesses, and sometimes duplicity, of ICPC, the EFCC, and the Code of Conduct Bureau.
And now, we encounter the PFIPC scandal at a time that these agencies, pretending to be cathedrals of ethical uprightness, are feigning dizziness to “discover” that Nigeria loses up to N25 trillion to corruption annually.
Where have they been? The National Assembly inserted11,122 projects worth N6.93tn into the 2025 budget. The World Bank recently flagged 5,000 TSA gaps, while the IMF found N8.83 trillion in unreported spending outside the official 2025 budget.
But Nigerians are not surprised. Because Nigerian “anti-corruption” consistently demonstrates that important political criminals are immune from accountability. That makes our anti-corruption preachers only worshippers of the status quo, not servants of the law. T
And that is why the ICPC investigation of the PFIPC scandal is a joke on our anti-corruption agencies. You are not investigating anything: this time, it is ICPC itself, and by implication the other anti-corruption agencies that are on trial.
People can see you, and through you. And you will go on record.
