By Fred Itua
Nigeria’s non-governmental and development sector receives billions of naira and millions of dollars in donor funding every year. It is one of the most resource-rich spaces in civil society. It is also one of the least interrogated.
The same names. Every year. Every grant.
If you have worked in Nigeria’s development sector for any length of time, you already know what I am about to say. There is a small, tightly-knit network of organisations and individuals who circulate at the top of this ecosystem.
They sit on each other’s advisory boards. They write recommendation letters for each other’s proposals. They attend the same donor cocktail evenings in Abuja and Lagos. And when grant cycles open, whether from the EU, FCDO, the Gates Foundation, or the UN family, the same cluster of organisations emerge as implementers, lead partners, or prime recipients.
New and emerging organisations quickly discover that access to donor funding in Nigeria operates like a members-only club. The barriers are rarely stated openly, but they are very real.
Donor agencies frequently require years of prior grant experience to qualify for funding. To get experience, you need a grant. To get a grant, you need experience. It is a deliberately circular trap.
Beyond that, many large grants are structured as consortium arrangements where an established “prime” organisation subcontracts smaller partners.
In practice, this means a well-connected Abuja-based NGO collects the bulk of the funding, takes a substantial management fee, and distributes modest subgrants to community organisations doing the actual work on the ground. The communities benefit least. The prime benefits most.
Relationship capital matters more than competence. Knowing the right programme officer at a donor agency, having a former USAID or UN staff member on your board, or being recommended by an existing grantee dramatically increases your chances of funding, regardless of your organisation’s actual track record or technical merit.
Here is the uncomfortable truth that very few people in this sector will say publicly: there is a profound lack of accountability in how donor funds are managed and reported in Nigeria’s NGO space.
Organisations receive multi-million naira grants to run programmes on education, healthcare, gender-based violence, good governance, and civic engagement.
Many of these programmes produce glossy reports, polished data, and carefully curated success stories for donor consumption. What they rarely produce is verifiable, independently audited evidence of impact or transparent documentation of how funds were actually spent at the field level.
The incentive structure is backwards. Organisations are rewarded for reporting well, not necessarily for performing well. As long as the narrative satisfies the donor’s internal review process, funding continues.
And because many international donors are themselves under pressure to show disbursement and results to their own governments and boards, they have little appetite to dig too deeply into the numbers.
The result is a sector where financial opacity is normalised, overhead costs are inflated, procurement is opaque, and staff payroll structures in some organisations would raise serious questions if subjected to proper scrutiny.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has focused much of its energy on politicians, bankers, and business people. Rightly so. But there is a category of financial flows that has largely escaped its gaze: donor funds passing through Nigerian NGOs and development organisations.
These are not small amounts. A single Bill Gates Foundation-funded project in Nigeria can run into hundreds of millions of naira over a three-to-five year implementation period. An EU-funded governance programme can disburse tens of millions of euros through local implementing partners.
Where exactly does that money go? Who authorises payments? What are the actual salaries of executive directors? What is the real cost of workshops, trainings, and consultancies that appear routinely on project budgets?
The EFCC has the legal mandate to investigate financial crimes regardless of the sector. Civil society is not a sacred space immune from financial misconduct. If anything, the moral branding of the sector, the language of service, impact, and social good, has made it easier to obscure financial irregularities behind the cover of good intentions.
A systematic review of the financial records of high-value NGO grant recipients in Nigeria is not an attack on the civil society. It is accountability. And accountability, ironically, is what most of these organisations claim to promote.
International donor agencies are not innocent bystanders in this system. By consistently favouring established partners, failing to invest meaningfully in building the capacity of newer and grassroots organisations, and prioritising administrative convenience over genuine inclusion, they have actively reinforced the cabal structure they occasionally claim to want to dismantle.
Genuine transformation of this sector requires donors to enforce open and competitive grant-making, mandate transparent sub-granting, require independent third-party audits, and take seriously the complaints of organisations that have been systematically excluded.
Nigeria’s development challenges are real and urgent. The organisations doing honest, impactful work in this space deserve recognition and support. But the sector as a whole cannot continue to operate as a closed, self-reinforcing network where donor funds enrich a connected few while the communities they are meant to serve remain largely unchanged.
The cabal is real. The money is significant. And the scrutiny is long overdue.
