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Between January 2021 and December 2025, the Nigerian Building and Road Research Institute (NBRRI) paid out ₦4.92 billion in consultancy and professional fees across 111 payments. That is the computed record of the institute’s own payment data, and every one of those payments falls within the tenure of Prof. Samson Duna, who took office in acting capacity in October 2020, was confirmed as Director-General on 21 December 2020 and was reappointed on 12 November 2024.
The striking feature of this spending is not just its size. A research institute paid out nearly ₦5 billion to consultants while awarding only ₦26.4 million in actual research grants over the same period.
Of the 111 consultancy payments, 37 went to a single company: Fuse Engineers Ltd, which collected ₦1,551,059,566.09, almost one-third of the entire consultancy vote.
The Fuse Engineers payments began on 10 February 2021, barely a month after Duna’s substantive confirmation, with ₦41,165,295 described as “consultancy services on project design and supervision of 2020 ZIP/capital projects.” That same near-identical description for design and supervision of the institute’s zonal intervention and capital projects repeats across 36 of the 37 payments, with amounts ranging from ₦18.3 million to ₦82.5 million. Twenty-six of the payments are explicitly labelled “extension” or “continuation” of the same consultancy, meaning the firm was repeatedly retained to keep supervising NBRRI’s projects rather than facing fresh competition. The Public Procurement Act 2007 requires that public procurement be conducted through open competitive bidding, and the repeated extension of one firm’s engagement raises the question of whether that requirement was satisfied or whether a single consultancy pipeline was simply kept open year after year.
The concentration held through every budget cycle. Fuse Engineers collected seven payments worth ₦240.1 million in 2021, ten worth ₦402.6 million in 2022, and seventeen worth ₦788.5 million in 2023 as its peak year. The flow continued into the current period: ₦37.9 million on 15 November 2024 for “continuation of consultancy services on project design and supervision under the 2024 capital budget,” ₦38.3 million on 27 February 2025 described as the balance for the same continuation, and ₦43.6 million as recently as 20 December 2025 for “on-going consultancy services under 2024 project.” That is a five-year, uninterrupted supervision franchise at an institute whose core mandate is research.
Fuse Engineers is not the only recurring name. The Institute of Development Finance and Project Management Ltd/Gte took 22 payments totalling ₦905,596,942.58, a further 18.4 percent of the consultancy vote for “socio-economic impact assessment” consultancy on the institute’s capital projects. Together, two firms absorbed roughly half of every naira NBRRI spent on consultants over five years.
Behind them, the same pattern repeats in smaller slices: Truthetech Multi-Construction Ltd took five payments of ₦242.6 million, Tested Engineering Construction Ltd six payments of ₦236 million, and Treadstones Projects International Ltd five payments of ₦223.3 million.
The tail of the cluster carries its own anomaly. On 20 December 2025 alone, NBRRI released a cluster of near-identical consultancy awards to Gisonik Global Services Ltd getting paid ₦87,115,449, Modescom Solutions Ltd walking away with ₦86,842,366, Ronelson Investment Ltd smiled home with ₦87,444,186, and Infrastructure Development Company Limited paid ₦87,181,196 with each described in almost the same words as “consultancy services for on-going consultancy services under 2024 project.”
Four firms, four awards within ₦700,000 of each other, issued on the same day, for consultancy that describes itself as “on-going consultancy.” Ten consultancy payments in the five days to 20 December 2025 totalled ₦711.2 million which is 14.5 percent of the five-year consultancy vote released in a single week, just days before the year’s end. The Financial Regulations require that consultancy engagements be demonstrably justified by defined deliverables and value for money; awards that are identical in amount, identical in wording, and issued in a year-end batch are precisely the kind of engagements those regulations demand be scrutinised.
The concentration of ₦1.55 billion in 37 supervision payments with one firm, the ₦905.6 million in impact-assessment consultancy with another, and the batch of identical ₦87 million year-end awards are red flags that has always require investigation by the Bureau of Public Procurement and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for a research institute under Prof. Duna to spend ₦4.92 billion on consultants against ₦26.4 million on research grants.
Source: …Secretsreporters