NGScorecard

As chairman of the Pension Reform Task Team (2010-2013), Maina was accused of embezzling billions of naira in pension funds meant for retired federal workers. He was dismissed from the civil service in 2013, but was controversially reinstated in 2017 by the Ministry of Interior under Buhari despite an outstanding EFCC warrant. He fled the country when the reinstatement scandal broke and was declared wanted before being extradited from Niger Republic in 2019.

The Federal High Court in Abuja convicted Maina of money laundering in October 2021 and sentenced him to eight years in prison. The case is one of the few pension-fraud prosecutions from the era to reach a conviction, though a subsequent appeal reduced the sentence, drawing criticism from anti-corruption groups.

As National Security Adviser under President Jonathan (2012-2015), Dasuki was accused of diverting funds budgeted for arms procurement to fight Boko Haram into disbursements to politicians, contractors, and religious leaders. He was arrested by the Buhari administration's DSS in December 2015 on charges of money laundering, illegal possession of firearms, and criminal breach of trust.

Federal courts and the ECOWAS Court of Justice repeatedly ordered his release on bail from 2016 onward, including a 2016 ECOWAS ruling that his continued detention was unlawful, but the DSS defied at least five separate court orders and held him without trial for four years. He was finally granted bail in December 2019 under restrictive conditions, and his underlying corruption trial remained unresolved when Buhari left office in 2023.

A special presidential probe panel set up by Buhari shortly after taking office reviewed petroleum subsidy claims paid out between 2011 and 2015, and found that oil marketers and NNPC-linked entities had claimed reimbursement for fuel volumes that were never imported or were diverted — part of a subsidy regime long flagged by anti-corruption bodies as Nigeria's single largest source of graft.

The panel referred its findings to the EFCC for recovery and prosecution. A handful of marketers faced charges over the following years, but most cases moved slowly through the courts, and only a small fraction of the flagged sums had been recovered by the time Buhari left office in 2023.

A series of videos leaked in 2018 appeared to show Kano State Governor Abdullahi Ganduje receiving bundles of US dollars in bribes from contractors in his office. Ganduje claimed the footage was doctored, while civil society groups and the Kano State House of Assembly called for an EFCC investigation.

The EFCC opened a preliminary review but never filed formal charges against Ganduje. He went on to be re-elected governor in 2019, and later became national chairman of the ruling APC. No forensic determination on the authenticity of the videos was ever made public.

A 2020 National Assembly probe into the Niger Delta Development Commission's interim management committee uncovered billions of naira in questionable payments, including a disputed ₦1.5 billion COVID-19 palliative line item for an agency with no medical mandate, alongside allegations of contract inflation and unremitted staff pension deductions.

The acting managing director and finance director were removed following the National Assembly hearings, and the EFCC opened investigations into several NDDC officials and contractors. No senior official had been convicted by the end of Buhari's term, and a promised forensic audit covering the commission's finances from 2001-2019 was never fully published.

A Senate ad-hoc committee found that Babachir Lawal, as Secretary to the Government of the Federation and head of the Presidential Initiative on the North East (PINE), had awarded an invasive-plant clearance contract for internally displaced persons' camps to a company he was linked to — an apparent conflict of interest involving public funds meant for IDP relief.

Buhari sacked Lawal in October 2017 following the Senate's report. The EFCC subsequently charged him with fraud and money laundering in 2018, but the trial proceeded slowly through the courts and had not concluded by the time Buhari left office in 2023.

A decorated Nigerian police officer, Kyari was indicted by a US federal grand jury in August 2021 for conspiring with Nigerian internet fraudster Ramon 'Hushpuppi' Abbas to help launder proceeds of a $1.1 million fraud, and was separately accused domestically of extorting suspects and facilitating a drug trafficking operation while heading the police Intelligence Response Team.

The Nigeria Police Force suspended and later dismissed Kyari, and a domestic drug-related tribunal process moved slowly. The United States' extradition request had not been granted by the end of Buhari's term, leaving him facing unresolved domestic proceedings rather than trial in either country.

The Code of Conduct Bureau accused the sitting Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen, of failing to fully declare several foreign and domestic bank accounts. The case was filed at the Code of Conduct Tribunal in January 2019, just weeks before the February 2019 presidential election in which any resulting Supreme Court election petitions would ordinarily have come before him.

The Code of Conduct Tribunal convicted Onnoghen in April 2019 and ordered his removal from office; Buhari gave effect to the removal immediately rather than through the National Assembly impeachment process many lawyers argued the constitution required. Onnoghen resigned rather than continue contesting the proceedings.

Abdulmumin Jibrin, then chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, publicly accused the Speaker and other principal officers of the House of inserting roughly ₦40 billion in padded, self-serving allocations into the 2016 federal budget.

The House suspended Jibrin for the remainder of his legislative term over the allegations. The leadership he accused denied any wrongdoing, and no criminal charges were ever filed against any of the named officials; the scandal faded from public attention without a resolving investigation.

EFCC operatives recovered $9.8 million and £74,000 in cash hidden in a house linked to Andrew Yakubu, a former Group Managing Director of the NNPC, during a raid in April 2017 — one of the largest single cash seizures of the anti-corruption drive.

Rather than proceeding through a full criminal trial, the EFCC and Yakubu reached a non-conviction-based forfeiture settlement in 2021, under which he forfeited the seized funds to the federal government without any admission of guilt or criminal conviction.