Secrets Reporters
Findings by SecretsReporters have laid bare a web of irregular payments totaling ₦52,469,176 linked to foreign trips undertaken by the Minister of Arts, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy, Barrister Hannatu Musa Musawa, and members of her team in November 2024.
The payments, processed through a voucher dated 24 December 2024, covered estacode, visa fees, airport taxi claims and air tickets for journeys to Salvador and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as well as France. Auditors found that critical supporting documents were missing, the wrong official approved the expenditure, an inflated exchange rate was applied, and a substantial chunk of the money was paid out under a 30 per cent “airport taxi” allowance that appears to have no basis in extant regulations.
According to the exclusive information in our possession, none of the refund claims was backed by boarding passes or immigration entry and exit stamps. Approval for the entire payment was given by the Honourable Minister herself rather than by the Director Overseeing the Office of the Permanent Secretary, who was the proper Accounting Officer at the time. An exchange rate of ₦1,730 to the dollar was used instead of the prevailing official rate of ₦1,685.62, generating excess payments. On top of that, ₦7,174,656 was disbursed to several officers as 30 per cent of their estacode and labelled “airport taxi”, a practice the findings describe as contrary to regulations.
The beneficiaries included the Minister, who received two separate estacode payments of ₦6,228,000 each for the Brazil and France legs (calculated at the $900 daily rate for ministers), as well as her Principal Advisor Faiz Imam, Special Advisers, a Personal Assistant and other ministry officials. One officer, Haruna Zango, Special Adviser on Artificial Intelligence, alone accounted for more than ₦11.4 million when air ticket costs were added. Visa processing fees of ₦150,000 each were also claimed by several aides.
These trips were not obscure. Public records show that Musawa led the African Union delegation to the G20 Ministers of Culture meeting held in Salvador, Brazil, in early to mid-November 2024, where she spoke on cultural diplomacy and held bilateral talks, including discussions on rehabilitating Nigeria’s Cultural House in the city. She was later listed among the senior officials who accompanied President Bola Tinubu to the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rio de Janeiro on 18–19 November. Around the same period she publicly stated that she was joining the President’s delegation on a state visit to Paris, with plans to engage French stakeholders on tourism and the creative sector.
Yet the audit trail for the corresponding refunds is incomplete. Without boarding passes and immigration stamps, there is no independent verification that the journeys occurred as claimed or that the full duration was spent abroad. The use of a higher exchange rate produced a measurable overpayment. The 30 per cent airport-taxi claim, amounting to more than ₦7.1 million, sits outside the normal framework of estacode and local-running allowances.
Under the Financial Regulations, the Permanent Secretary (or the officer designated as Accounting Officer) is fully responsible for the human, material and financial resources of the ministry. An officer who makes an irregular payment is required to explain it within 21 days; failure to do so triggers recovery and removal from the schedule. In this case the Minister both authorised the payment and personally benefited from it, while the Director of Finance and Accounts would have been responsible for processing the voucher and ensuring documentary compliance.
The findings attribute the anomalies to weaknesses in the ministry’s internal control system and explicitly flag the risks of diversion and misapplication of public funds which the Permanent Secretary is meant to justify the payments made without supporting travel evidence, explain why the Minister approved expenditure that fell outside her role as Accounting Officer, account for the use of the higher exchange rate, produce any regulation that authorises a 30 per cent estacode airport-taxi payment, recover the ₦7,174,656 immediately, and provide proof that the official trips took place.
This episode occurs against the backdrop of a ministry that has positioned itself as a flagship of the Tinubu administration’s non-oil diversification agenda. Officials have spoken of ambitions to generate tens of billions of dollars in creative-economy value, create millions of jobs, and attract large external investment commitments. The same ministry has previously been the subject of exclusive audit concerns over a ₦750 million special intervention whose Authority to Incur Expenditure could not be produced. The travel-refund irregularities now add a second, more granular layer of accountability questions focused on the personal and official travel of the Minister and her immediate circle.
Estacode rates for ministers stand at $900 per night according to Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission data. The official naira-dollar rate in late November 2024 hovered in the mid-to-high ₦1,600s, making the ₦1,730 rate applied in these claims noticeably higher. The combination of missing documents, incorrect approving authority, rate inflation and questionable add-on allowances has left a clear trail of irregularity.