The Forensic Audit of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) was ordered by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019 in response to years of legislative investigations, whistleblower disclosures, and civil society reports documenting pervasive corruption in the Commission, which had been established by the NDDC Act of 2000 to accelerate the development of Nigeria's oil-producing Niger Delta region. The audit was formally launched by the Federal Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs in 2020 and conducted by a team of forensic auditors over approximately eighteen months, covering the period from the Commission's establishment in 2001 through 2019—roughly eighteen years of operations.
The completed forensic audit report was presented to President Buhari by Niger Delta Affairs Minister Godswill Akpabio and Attorney-General of the Federation Abubakar Malami at a ceremony at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on 2 September 2021. Its findings were staggering. Over the eighteen-year audit period, the NDDC had received approximately ₦6 trillion in allocations from the Federation Account, statutory contributions from oil companies, and other sources. Of the 13,777 projects examined, the overwhelming majority were found to be compromised—either abandoned, fictitious, over-invoiced, or awarded to companies lacking the capacity or legal standing to execute them. The Commission was found to maintain 362 separate bank accounts that had not been fully disclosed to supervising authorities, facilitating the fragmentation and concealment of funds. AGF Malami placed the dollar equivalent of misappropriated funds at approximately $14 billion over the period.
Following the report's presentation, 1,250 non-performing contracts were formally terminated by December 2022, with the EFCC recovering cash refunds from contractors. President Buhari declared in July 2022 that the report was being implemented 'in phases.' However, critics and civil society organisations noted that despite the scale of the findings, prosecutions remained extremely limited relative to the number of actors implicated, and that successive NDDC management teams—often operating under acting, rather than confirmed, boards—had themselves been implicated in the audit period. A Senate probe running concurrently had produced televised confessions from NDDC officials of cash payments for legislative patronage, underscoring the political economy that had perpetuated the Commission's dysfunction.