Odogwu stealer
An ex-power minister is giving Anini a run for his money. Also, Tinubu is complaining about debts, the education minister is bragging with the barest minimum and Hantavirus is breathing down our necks
Good morning, Big Brains. I start my final exams next week, and I genuinely can’t wait to be done with school. The first thing I’m doing afterwards is sleeping for like 20 hours because I really need it. I’m still thinking of ways to make this newsletter hit like crack. Help me figure it out by filling out this form. Let’s get into it.
- Orame
Word count: 2,392 words
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In the madhouse that is Nigeria, many things go down within the week, and it can be difficult to grasp them all. This edition of The Big Daily newsletter cuts through the noise and sifts through the debris to bring you the four biggest news stories that shaped the week.
Let’s get into this week’s Big-4:
An ex-power minister stole ₦33.8 billion to fund his lifestyle
Tinubu wants Africa to do as he says, not as he does
One million kids are back in school, but millions more are still out
Nigeria cannot bear to have another rat problem
An ex-power minister stole ₦33.8 billion to fund his lifestyle
There’s something almost impressive about the way politicians in Nigeria always find new ways to outdo themselves. Just when you think it can’t get worse, a random government official says, “Hold my beer.” The latest person to do this is the former Minister of Power, Saleh Mamman.
On Wednesday, May 13, 2026, the Federal High Court in Abuja sentenced Mamman to 75 years in prison after convicting him on all 12 counts of money laundering brought against him by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
The ex- power minister (2019-2021) was found to have conspired with ministry officials and private companies to divert ₦33.8 billion from funds allocated to two critical energy infrastructure projects: the Mambilla and Zungeru hydroelectric power plants.
Mamman probably saw this verdict coming because he didn’t show up in court for the verdict. But Justice James Omotosho, the Federal High Court judge who delivered the ruling, came aura for aura and used the law to sentence him in absentia. He also ordered Interpol and all Nigerian security agencies to find Mamman and bring him in.
Omotosho was not done with him. The judge said, “Rather than creating a legacy to tackle the epileptic power supply in the country, the defendant was living large at the expense of ordinary citizens.” His words need no explaining.
If you’re still marvelled at the ₦33.8 billion Mamman diverted, you might want to pick your jaws off the floor because he has a separate EFCC case ongoing. In this case, he and seven others are accused of complicity in a ₦31 billion fraud connected to the same Mambilla and Zungeru projects.
The Zungeru plant, a 700-megawatt facility on the Kaduna River in Niger State, was eventually completed and commissioned in 2023 at a cost of $1.3 billion, becoming Nigeria’s second-largest hydroelectric power plant. But even then, it barely scratched the surface; the estimated 2.64 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) it’s expected to generate per year serve only about 10% of Nigeria’s energy needs.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the entire 10% generated still doesn’t reach Nigerians due to transmission infrastructure so old that it still bears labels from the Electricity Company of Nigeria (ECN), a body that ceased to exist decades ago.
Mambilla is a different story entirely. The proposed 3,050-megawatt project in Taraba State has been trapped in legal and administrative limbo for over 40 years. As of now, construction has not begun. The $6 billion project remains in pre-construction and is entangled in court disputes. One of the men responsible for shepherding it forward was, instead, allegedly siphoning its funds into private accounts and a property in Abuja he bought in cash.
Nigeria has an installed generation capacity of about 13,625 megawatts (MW), but in December 2025, only 38% of that capacity was available for dispatch. According to the Operational Performance of Power Plants factsheet released by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), only 5,151MW of the country’s 13,625MW capacity was available for dispatch at any point during December 2025.
The national grid collapsed three times in less than a month, from late December 2025 to January 2026. Average daily generation is stuck below 5,000MW despite a population of over 235 million. The Africa Trade Barometer report states that businesses lose about $26 billion each year and spend more than $22 billion, fuelling the use of private generators to compensate for power failures.
The Mamman conviction is a confession about the systemic rot that lives within Nigeria’s power sector. While Nigeria’s electricity issues stem from several factors, mismanagement and corruption by figures such as the ex-minister certainly worsen the problem. When funds marked for crucial projects are diverted into private accounts, the consequences could mean another year of darkness for millions of Nigerians.
Nigerians deserve a functional power sector, one that isn’t run by people out to loot funds but by people who want to improve the infrastructure of the sector.
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Tinubu wants Africa to do as he says, not as he does
There’s a Nigerian parent somewhere reading this newsletter and preparing the speech of the century about living within your means, because nothing screams irony like complaining about debt while owing everybody in the world.
At the Africa Forward Summit held in Kenya on Tuesday, May 12, President Tinubu argued that the high borrowing costs imposed by global financial institutions are suppressing manufacturing growth across African economies and holding the continent back from industrialisation.
Then, in the same breath, he said that Nigeria will spend $11.6 billion on debt servicing in 2026, more than double the $5.2 billion spent in 2025.
At this stage, anyone can see that Nigeria’s financial problems are essentially a revenue problem. The country struggles to raise enough steady revenue. Oil income, driven by global prices, fluctuates over time; this has pushed administration after administration to borrow just to cover basic spending. By March 2026, Nigeria’s total public debt had climbed to ₦149.39 trillion, a 22.8% increase from the previous year.
In June 2025, Tinubu signed four landmark tax reform bills, namely the Nigeria Tax Act, the Nigeria Tax Administration Act, the Nigeria Revenue Service Act, and the Joint Revenue Board Act. These represent the most comprehensive overhaul of Nigeria’s fiscal architecture in decades. The goal, according to the federal government, is to move Nigeria from a nation that borrows to survive to one that invests to thrive. Early signs are cautiously optimistic: tax collections in the first nine months of 2025 surpassed ₦22tn, on track to exceed the full-year target of ₦25.2tn.
But the 2026 debt servicing bill threatens to swallow nearly half of the projected ₦34.33 trillion government revenue for the year. Capital expenditures and social investment are being deferred, and Nigerians, already bearing the pain of subsidy removal and new taxes, are being asked to wait for a fiscal transformation whose benefits have yet to arrive.
Tinubu’s central argument at the international forum was that high borrowing costs suppress African manufacturing and economic growth, but the credibility of that argument depends entirely on what Nigeria’s own borrowing has built. A nation cannot demand fairer terms from global creditors while its own debt-servicing costs are doubling in a single year with little visible impact to show for it.
The tax reforms and their potential are significant, but they are also untested. Until Nigeria can demonstrate that its revenue base, not just its debt, is growing, the fiscal math doesn’t hold. So, it’s about time Nigeria took non-oil revenues more seriously. It also needs to plug the leakages that have historically undermined revenue projections in order to get Nigeria out of the vicious borrowing cycle.
The government must build institutions strong enough that it does not need to borrow to pay its bills.
One million kids are back in school, but millions more are still out
On May 12, 2026, Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, claimed that the federal government has returned more than one million out-of-school children to classrooms over the past 30 months. He also questioned the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) estimate of 18.3 million out-of-school children in Nigeria. He said FG’s count in eight states suggests the number is actually under 8 million.
Alausa cited Kaduna as an example; according to him, UNICEF estimated 1.8 million out-of-school children in the state; the government’s mapping found about 700,000. We’re not sure if that’s supposed to be a gotcha moment because this still means that 700,000 children in one state alone aren’t in school.
So far, the federal government’s mapping covers fewer than a quarter of Nigeria’s 36 states. Using incomplete data to estimate a national figure and then presenting it on TV says a lot about how quickly the government rejects claims that make it look bad.
In 2024, UNICEF ranked Nigeria as the country with the highest number of out-of-school children globally, with 10.2 million at primary school age and 8.1 million at the junior secondary level. Meanwhile, Nigeria allocated 7.3% of its 2025 budget to education, against UNESCO’s recommended minimum of 15–20%.
Nigeria has faced an out-of-school children problem for over two decades. Every government in that period has announced programmes and initiatives, yet the number has continued to rise. What Nigeria needs is a well-funded implementation plan, with annual progress reports that any Nigerian can read and interrogate. The children of Nigeria deserve a government that does the work and does it well.
Nigeria cannot bear to have another rat problem
Nigerians are not strangers to rodent-borne diseases. That is the uncomfortable context in which the global hantavirus alert should land.
Last week, on May 8, 2026, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Africa Centre for Disease Control (CDC) warned that no African country is immune to a hantavirus outbreak. As of that date, eight cases had been reported globally, including three deaths, with six confirmed cases still under investigation. In the African continent, two cases have been identified, specifically in South Africa.
In that time, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) confirmed that Nigeria had no recorded cases and that the overall public risk remained low. But low risk is not zero risk, and sadly, Nigeria cannot afford to treat “low risk” as a synonym for “no action required.”
Hantaviruses are primarily transmitted through contact with infected rodents, their droppings, and the dust contaminated by those excretions. In the Americas, hantaviruses can cause hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), a severe respiratory illness, with a fatality rate up to 50%.
There are currently no vaccines or widely available treatments, according to the WHO Regional Office for Africa (WHO-AFRO). The global health bodies specifically flagged weak diagnostics, uneven surveillance systems, and inadequate preparedness at ports of entry as Africa’s major vulnerabilities.
Only 16 African countries, including Nigeria, have Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing capacity for hantavirus detection, but even Nigeria’s existing PCR infrastructure, the WHO warned, is hampered by limited access to hantavirus-specific diagnostic kits and reagents.
The problem is that Nigeria already lives with a rodent-borne virus that kills people every year, and its response to that one remains inadequate. Lassa fever, which is also carried by rodents, has no vaccine and also produces haemorrhagic complications in severe cases. It has recorded 191 deaths in Nigeria as of the first week of May 2026, with a case fatality rate of 24.6%, up from 19.2% during the same period in 2025.
The NCDC’s situation report cites late presentation of cases, inadequate environmental sanitation, poor health-seeking behaviour, and the high cost of treatment as persistent drivers of fatality. Lassa fever has spread from 20 to 34 of Nigeria’s states between 2018 and 2023.
The NCDC has activated enhanced surveillance in response to the international advisory, but surveillance, while essential, without sanitation is futile. Hantavirus and Lassa fever share the same primary vector: rodents that thrive in poorly maintained environments, markets, and homes where waste is not managed. The conditions that make Nigeria vulnerable to Lassa fever are the same conditions that would make it vulnerable to hantavirus if the virus ever arrived.
There are concrete, non-expensive things that can reduce Nigeria’s exposure. Rodent control in markets and dense urban settlements, aggressive public education about hantavirus symptoms, stockpiling hantavirus-specific diagnostic reagents before they are needed, and training healthcare workers to recognise clinical presentations that differ from Lassa fever and malaria are all steps that can be taken to prevent an outbreak from ever occurring.
Nigeria did not learn the Lassa fever lesson aggressively enough. It shouldn’t require a confirmed hantavirus case to start taking this one seriously.
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