On the occasion of the International Anti-Corruption Day in 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari launched Nigeria's Open Treasury Portal (OTP), signing off on a financial transparency policy that was designed to put details of projects above N5 million within the public's reach.
The Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation (OAGF) was to publish daily payments above N10 million, while ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) were to publish daily payments above N5 million; quarterly statements and audited annual accounts were to be filed within set deadlines, all in line with International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS).
Six years on, the portal is still up, but the promise is still half-kept. Between September 2018 and May 2020 alone, BudgIT's review of the platform examined over 100,000 payment entries and flagged at least 2,900 payments to individuals worth roughly N51 billion, with single transfers as large as N2.04 billion landing in personal accounts without any description, a contravention of Section 16 of the Public Procurement Act (PPA) 2007.
In April 2022, the portal went dark for weeks, with the OAGF blaming Galaxy Backbone, the IT firm hosting it. By December 2024, with the 2025 budget being presented to the National Assembly, the FIJ found the portal inaccessible again, contravening NITDA's own guidelines that government websites must remain operational at all times.
As of today, many of the daily payment reports are unavailable or inaccessible on the portal, a review by UDEME has shown. For instance, all reports of daily payments in January 2026 are not accessible. Only payments made on the 20th to 28th are documented for February; payments made between March 9th and 22nd were unaccounted for, just the same way payments from April 13th to 22nd are omitted.
So, the question is not whether Nigeria has an open treasury portal; it is whether the portal is active and efficient enough to deter fraud and support the media and civil society to rebuild trust in a system that the country's auditors keep telling us is leaking.
This report by UDEME, a social accountability project of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), reviews Nigeria's OTP against three peer platforms in the United States, Ukraine, South Korea, and Kenya.
What the OTP was meant to do
The portal was sold to Nigerians as a daily mirror of federal cash flow. Every inflow into the public purse, every outgoing payment above the N5 million naira threshold and every contract that hits the Treasury Single Account (TSA) - all of it was meant to be documented online within a working day, with the responsible MDA, beneficiary, purpose and amount attached. Combined with the Treasury Single Account rollout, the OTP was Nigeria's clearest commitment to the Open Government Partnership (OGP) since the country joined the global transparency body in 2016.
Journalists at TheCable pulled it apart in 2020 to expose, among other things, a N479 million transfer from the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on the Niger Delta to eleven private accounts in a single day, dressed up as Niger Delta youth stipends. BudgIT's GovSpend platform, launched in August 2021 to scrape and clean the OTP's messy spreadsheets, has surfaced the kind of expenditure the federal government would rather not explain. One of BudgIT's own examples, raised at DataFest Africa 2024, was a single-day N244 million payment by the presidency for car tyres.
Useful as those stories are, every one of them required a workaround, as reporters did not pull them off the OTP cleanly. They downloaded PDFs, wrestled with broken Excel files, cross-checked beneficiary names against company databases at the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) and even built their own analysis pipelines. Over the years, this has made it difficult for citizens to easily access data, track spending and ultimately hold the government to account.
Four gaps that limit the OTP's efficiency
Inaccessible Format
Most data on the OTP is published as PDFs and inconsistent Excel sheets, not in machine-readable formats. Even Nigeria's federal budgets in recent years have been released as scanned, signed sheets that are not OCR-readable, defeating any attempt at line-item analysis without manual re-keying. The International Budget Partnership's 2023 review confirmed that the portal lets you understand a little more about Nigeria's public finances but falls short of permitting systematic and rigorous analysis.
No procurement linkage
Most payments appear without details of their underlying contracts. A reader sees that a ministry paid N66.2 million to a named company, but the contract number, award process, scope of work and competing bids are often undocumented. Without that linkage, the OTP can show you the money leaving but not if it was the right amount to that vendor or for that purpose. This is the gap that the Nigeria Open Contracting Portal (NOCOPO), run by the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), was meant to fill, but the two systems are not interoperable and rarely speak to each other.
Federal scope only
The OTP covers the federal government and its MDAs, but not the 36 states or the 774 local government areas, where a sizeable share of public money is appropriated and a large share of corruption suspicions live. CSOs like the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), BudgIT and the CJID have spent years pressing for state-level fiscal disclosure, which the federal portal makes no provision for.
No citizen feedback loop
The portal provides no channel for a Nigerian to report a duplicate payment, an inflated contract or a beneficiary that does not exist. SERAP, commenting on the 2022 shutdown, held that the silence around the portal's outages may not amount to corruption itself but makes corruption easier. A platform that doesn't accept citizen reports cannot close that loop.
What the rest of the world is doing
UDEME reviewed three peer platforms from across the globe, including one within Africa, to show what the OTP could become.
USAspending.gov
The US USAspending.gov portal sits on the 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (the DATA Act), which forces every federal agency to publish standardised spending data. A journalist, a researcher or a curious taxpayer can pull contract, grant and loan data through a public API or grab bulk CSVs through the site's Custom Award Download. Recipients are tied to government-wide identifiers, contracts cross-walk with their underlying obligations, and the database covers everything from a single Department of Agriculture purchase order to the full life cycle of a multi-billion-dollar Pentagon procurement. Analysts complain about lag and reconciliation issues, and the system has its own quarrels with completeness. The architecture is one that Nigeria does not yet have: machine-readable, queryable, contract-linked, backed by law.
Ukraine: Prozorro and DoZorro
Born out of the 2014 Maidan revolution and the abuses it exposed, Prozorro (Ukrainian word for "transparent") became mandatory for all state contractors in 2016. It is open-source and built on a simple motto that "everyone sees everything". According to the U.S. State Department's December 2021 Strategy on Countering Corruption, Prozorro had already saved Ukraine almost $6 billion in public funds since October 2017.
However, a civic layer is what makes Prozorro really work. DoZorro, run by Transparency International Ukraine, lets any citizen, business or NGO file feedback on a tender, flag a suspicious bid or report a violation directly to the State Audit Service via an integrated API. By 2018, the OGP named DoZorro the best citizen-engagement project in Ukraine and by 2020, more than 100,000 monthly users were running checks through it. The platform has used machine learning since 2018 to auto-detect risky tenders and route them to human reviewers. In three years, that community uncovered violations in over 30,000 tenders worth roughly $4 billion, fixing problems in 14 per cent of cases.
South Korea: dBrain+ and Open Fiscal Data
Korea's dBrain (short for digital brain) was rolled out in 2007 after the 1997 financial crisis forced a hard rethink of the country's fiscal management. It is the engine room, an integrated budget and accounting system that handles formulation, execution, settlement and performance evaluation across the entire central government and ties into 63 external systems, including the Bank of Korea and the National Tax Service. In 2015, the Ministry of Economy and Finance opened dBrain to the public through Open Fiscal Data, a citizen-facing layer that publishes budget execution by ministry, by spending division and by type of expenditure, with infographics for the casual reader and full datasets for analysts.
Two features stand out for any Nigerian policymaker reading this. The first is real-time. Withdrawals from the treasury are digitised end-to-end, and the 2022 dBrain+ upgrade runs AI simulations to forecast the national treasury balance daily. The second is incentive. Korea's Budget Waste Report Center pays citizens up to roughly $30,000 if their reports of budget waste are confirmed and lead to recovered savings. With this, whistleblowing has a bank account with no legal kickbacks or fear of victimisation and persecution.
Kenya: the Public Procurement Information Portal
Closer to home is Kenya's Public Procurement Information Portal (PPIP). It was launched in July 2018 under Executive Order No. 2 of 2018 and runs on the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act of 2015. The portal covers tender notices, addenda, evaluation results and contract awards from over 1,000 national procuring entities and across all 47 county governments. Under Kenya's 2010 Constitution, counties are responsible for a meaningful share of the development budget, and the PPIP brings their tenders into the same window as the country's federal ministries.
A February 2022 reconfiguration by iLabAfrica at Strathmore University added contract-award visibility, automated tender notifications and complaint-handling channels. Citizens, suppliers and CSOs can monitor procurements and submit feedback on contract delivery. The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) publishes the underlying data in the Open Contracting Data Standard format, which means the same dataset can be cross-checked against tax records, beneficial-ownership filings or county budgets without bespoke scraping.
What Nigeria can do, in concrete terms
None of these systems were built quickly. Korea took two decades, while Ukraine got there in five years, forced by a revolution. Nigeria's OTP does not need a revolution; it needs five practical fixes that the OAGF, under Accountant-General Shamseldeen Babatunde Ogunjimi, can begin without new legislation.
Present data in machine-readable formats
One profound step is to move the data into machine-readable formats by default, precisely presenting data in CSV and JSON formats for every dataset, with a public API as the medium-term goal. The current PDF-and-Excel approach, frequently with merged cells and inconsistent column headers, is a barrier dressed as a release.
Link payments to procurement
The OTP and NOCOPO should share a contract identifier so that a citizen who sees a payment can pull the underlying contract in one click and vice versa. The Bureau of Public Procurement and the OAGF have the mandate, but what is missing is interoperability.
Extension of scope to subnational
Nigeria's 36 states have signed onto the OGP through the State Action Plans process, yet only a few publish daily fiscal data in any usable form. A federally supported template, even an opt-in one, hosted on the OTP's infrastructure, would let states like Kaduna, Lagos and Edo, which have already moved on to procurement transparency, publish at the same standard. Local governments, where audits routinely surface ghost projects, should be encouraged or mandated to follow by law.
Build a citizen reporting channel
A simple form on the OTP, integrated with the OAGF's internal audit unit and the EFCC's spending-fraud desk, would let Nigerians flag suspicious payments the way Ukrainians flag suspicious tenders on DoZorro. Even a non-AI version of the Korean Budget Waste Report Centre, with reasonable rewards for verified reports, would shift the incentives.
Adopt machine-driven anomaly detection
Duplicate beneficiaries, round-number payments to personal accounts, identical descriptions across MDAs and unusual frequency patterns are the kind of red flags that AI handles well, and Ukraine's DoZorro has been doing it since 2018. Nigeria's payments database is large enough to train models, and the OAGF, in partnership with civic-tech actors like BudgIT and CJID, has the operational reach to deploy them.
Why it matters now
Nigeria's N68.32 trillion federal budget for 2026, signed into law by President Bola Tinubu in April, is the largest in the country's history. The version Tinubu presented to lawmakers in December 2025 projected N58.18 trillion in expenditure against N34.33 trillion in expected revenue, a N23.85 trillion deficit at 4.28% of GDP. By the President's own admission at the presentation, only 17.7% of the year's capital allocation had reached projects as at Q3 (the third quarter).
Where money flows out faster than it flows in and where less than a fifth of the capital budget reaches projects in nine months, the case for knowing exactly where it goes stops being academic.
The OTP, on its own terms, is one of the most important fiscal-transparency infrastructures Nigeria has built. It has survived two presidents, several reshuffles at the OAGF and at least two prolonged outages, yet it is still active and publishing. As such, the point is not to replace it. It is to bring it up to the standard that its peers in these countries have set, while it still has the public credibility to be repaired rather than rebuilt. Six years in, the portal is still half-open, with accessibility concerns still dominating conversations.
