By Sonala Olumhense

In 2016, the presidency announced what might have been a turning point in Nigeria’s anti-corruption history: 300 companies and influential individuals, including retired and serving military officers, were indicted by a committee investigating contract awards by the Office of the National Security Adviser between 2011 and 2015.President Muhammadu Buhari, who had come into office vowing to terminate corruption in Nigeria, was less than one year into his first term when spokesman Garba Shehu cleared his throat at the microphone.It was a massive story.  And it was all over the place: The Guardian. SaharaReporters. The Punch. Premium Times. The Nation. Channels TV. Reuters.Shehu was careful to differentiate this panel from the Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement.  I will return to that.The government said it had already recovered more than N7 billion, was demanding the refund of N41 billion, and had referred an additional N75 billion for investigation by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and other agencies.It sounded as if it was the beginning of a systemic reckoning, as if Buhari was whom he had advertised himself to be.“Dasukigate” was not a typical corruption case. It was not built around a single contract, a single ministry, or even a single network. It was a system-wide exposure of how national security funds, shielded by secrecy, urgency, and executive discretion, could be disbursed at scale with minimal verification.

The committee’s structure reflected that ambition. Companies were divided into categories: those that failed to execute contracts or executed them partially, those that received payments without contractual basis, and those flagged for further investigation.In parallel, individuals, ranging from politically exposed persons to serving and retired military officers, were identified as beneficiaries of funds whose legal or operational justification was, at best, unclear.In effect, the government created what should have become Nigeria’s most comprehensive public accountability ledger for security spending.But that was a ruse, as we would see in the transition from naming to prosecuting. Of 300 entities, the visible enforcement trail quickly narrowed to a handful of high-profile cases. At the centre was former NSA Sambo Dasuki.

And the story grew, even attracting extensive reporting by the Washington Post in collaboration with Premium Times.Across Buhari’s two terms, Dasuki’s prosecution dragged through multiple charge sheets, jurisdictions, and procedural resets. Today, the case continues to be reconstituted, with fresh arraignments and evidentiary disputes still unfolding.What never emerged is a systematic prosecution pipeline matching the scale of the original allegations. The result is a persistent and peculiar Nigerian story: a scandal defined by hundreds of names, but an enforcement record defined by a few, often inconclusive, litigations.If prosecutions stalled, the alternative accountability mechanism of refunds might have provided clarity. The government’s own figures suggested that tens of billions of naira were either recovered or earmarked for recovery from companies accused of failing to deliver on contracts. Even here, opacity prevailed.The refund, or recovery, list, by far the largest category, contains dozens of companies said to have received payments for contracts they either did not execute or only partially executed. Nigerians were never told who refunded what, if anything.Again, this is familiar Nigerian terrain. But without a company-by-company recovery trail, the public cannot verify whether the announced recoveries were ever undertaken, let alone to what degree.Nigerians always seem to receive the doubt, never the benefit of it. The compromised are canonised, given appointments and titles.That is why the most striking feature of the ONSA list today is not the few names that appear in court records, but the many that do not.Dozens of companies that were cited in 2016 have left little or no trace in subsequent enforcement reporting.Some may have quietly refunded funds, but there is no way to tell whether they simply paid off public officials.In July 2016, Buhari’s CADEP announced that 52 persons, including former and present military officers, had been indicted.The committee also exposed one of Nigeria’s largest corruption systems and triggered arrests and prosecutions.Like the ONSA-300, however, CADEP has not produced one durable, system-defining conviction of its principal targets. Not one.  Transparency International described the process as “superficial and irregular,” and stated that the findings of the committee “have not yielded the desired result.”This is what Nigeria, on the platform of a complicit anti-corruption regime and judiciary, as well as an indifferent and forgetful mass media, has become.  In routine fashion, in the ONSA and CADEP investigations, the bulk of published lists dissolve into administrative ambiguity.  Nobody of any “significance” is convicted, and we merely await the next scandal.But when we consider that at stake here were security funds to be deployed as Nigeria faced existential threats from insurgency and assorted instability, these were not just funds being stolen; it was sabotage.Ten years on, on March 10, 2026, Justice J.K. Omotosho of the Federal High Court in Abuja delivered a judgment that should have stopped Nigeria in its tracks.He discharged and acquitted Mrs Isabella Mimie Oshodin and Bob Oshodin Organisation Limited of all 25 counts of money laundering.Their trial dated back to that ONSA-300 list, among the most extensively documented corruption cases in Nigerian judicial history.  And yet, for an entire month, all the judiciary reporters seemed to have been on vacation.  No media house noticed!Justice Omotosho’s judgment was as much of an indictment of the EFCC as it was an acquittal of the defendants, the agency having “failed to establish the offences beyond reasonable doubt.” Even the EFCC’s own investigators admitted that they had never visited the Bob Oshodin Organisation factory in Benin City and had never investigated whether Dasuki had proper authority to approve the payments.The court even found that a prosecution witness corroborated the defence!What the Oshodin judgment makes plain is the ongoing scandal of the EFCC: an agency permitted to operate in the dark, accountable to no auditable standard, develops the habits of an agency that does not expect to be judged. Its investigators never visit the crime scene. It possesses evidence it fails to tender. It prosecutes the spouse while the principal flees. It announces the case but buries the outcome.The scale of the naming in 2016 created a public expectation of closure. When over 300 entities are identified in connection with public funds, the logical endpoint is comprehensive accounting.  We have none.But this matter is broader than one courtroom or one scandal or one agency.  I write it because of our history, particularly when we choose to ignore or forget it.Today, Nigeria’s history is being fried in a pot bigger than any in which it has been cooked before by people who expect to benefit from it and get away with it.Nigeria is heading for an election year in which, before the entire world, almost every aspect of our democracy is being called into question by utterly unscrupulous and unprincipled people.Like ONSA-300, these stories will make the headlines.  And then conveniently disappear.@Sonala Olumhense