7,000 forest guards were sworn in and promised salaries "immediately". Eight months later they say they aren't paid. I found where their money is.

Fair warning*: this one is long, and it gets more technical as it goes. Read as far as the box with the budget line in it and then decide if those three lines don't stop you, nothing after them will.*

On 1 October the Tinubu Files go out. Everything I post between now and then is deliberately heavier than what came before, because I would rather build an audience that checks me than one that claps. This is the heaviest so far. Every document behind it is linked at the bottom, so you can take it apart yourself.

A quarter of a trillion naira. One line. Two completely unrelated things.

--

On 27 December 2025, in seven states at once, about 7,000 men graduated from three months of training as Nigeria's National Forest Guard. The government's own release gives the detail you only give when you are proud of something: 98.2% completed the course, 81 were disqualified on discipline, two died of pre-existing conditions. The National Security Adviser told them, and I am quoting the release:

"Salaries and allowances will commence immediately, and every certified guard will proceed directly to assigned duty posts."

Eight months later Nigerian papers reported that they are not being paid. Guards in Niger State on a flat ₦75,000 regardless of rank, carrying locally made guns. Guards in Taraba unpaid and therefore never deployed. No casualty register exists for a force sent into the forests, though the men quoted say colleagues have died.

So I went to find their money in the 2026 Appropriation Act. It is there. All of it, in one line.

ERGP14247846 PRESIDENTIAL AIR FLEET LOGISTICS AND MANAGEMENT
INCLUDING OPERATION OF NATIONAL FOREST GUARD
NEW 283,850,000,000

That is the only national appropriation for a forest guard in 2,635 pages. The force has no head of its own, no agency code, no subheads, no figure of its own. It is a clause welded onto the end of the budget for the aircraft that fly the President, and the two of them share one number with no split stated anywhere.

Here is what makes that indefensible rather than merely untidy. The Presidential Air Fleet already has its own vote in the same Act ₦14,703,459,170, itemised down to ₦42,000,000 for three Hilux, engine overhauls named aircraft by aircraft. The Act can itemise this fleet. It does. And then it puts nineteen times that amount on an unitemised line somewhere else, while cutting the fleet's own named vote from ₦17,315,977,993.

That somewhere else is vote 0238005002, the Service Wide Vote — the central pot owned by no ministry, overseen by no sectoral committee, sharing a page with Contingency at ₦200bn.

I assumed the forest-guard clause was slipped in by the National Assembly. It was not. It is in the Executive's own Bill of 20 December 2025, character for character identical. The Assembly edited the lines around it that week — ₦400bn cut from contractor liabilities, one code's entire purpose swapped out and did not touch this one by a naira or a word.

Eight days before those guards graduated, the President presented the budget carrying their money. The word "guard" does not appear in the speech.

In 2013 the Auditor-General reported that money in this vote cannot be traced. His own words, paragraph 2.123 of the report on the 2012 accounts:

"it was not possible to track the amounts in the CRF Bank statements to a particular MDA, thereby creating difficulty in audit trail"

In his report on 2016 he found ₦19,091,610,811 paid out of this vote to four agencies without the Finance Minister's approval "some of the payments were made on a purported verbal directive from the Director-General" and concluded it was "difficult to accept the payments to the MDAs as proper and legitimate charges against public funds."

Thirteen years later the vote is bigger, the queries went nowhere, the audit of the federation runs three to four years behind, and the Auditor-General's own website serves the download links for its two most recent reports pointing at localhost an address that only works on the auditor's own computer. The bill that would fix the deadlines passed both chambers in December 2025 and has sat with the President ever since, neither signed nor refused, long past the thirty days the Constitution allows.

Before anyone tells me this is just how Nigerian budgeting works, I checked that too. There are roughly 468,000 federal payments published since 2018. Searching them for `ERGP14247846` returns nothing. Searching for another project code, `ERGP21250280`, returns this:

12 May 2026 · FEDERAL COLLEGE OF HORTICULTURE, DADIN-KOWA, GOMBE · BRIGHTTECH RESOURCES LIMITED · ₦29,070,900 · "ERGP21250280: SUPPLY OF FOOD ITEMS ACROSS THE NATION (MULTIPLE LOTS) LOCATION 10"

A horticulture college in Gombe publishes its budget code, its supplier and its purpose on a ₦29m payment. The line holding ₦283.85bn publishes none of the three. It is not that the system cannot do it. Somebody there does it, voluntarily, on payments a ten-thousandth of the size.

And the entire published record contains exactly one payment mentioning a forest guard, anywhere, in nine years: ₦26,081,238.14 to a company in December 2023 from the National Park Service, not from this vote.

The procurement side is emptier still. The Presidential Air Fleet is a registered procuring entity on Nigeria's open contracting portal, with its own slot beside the DSS and the EFCC. Its slot contains zero records. State House has 141, every one of them at planning stage, not one naming a contractor, not one carrying a contract value ₦145,552,897,151 of intentions with nobody's name on them.

CHECK ALL OF IT YOURSELF

Every document below is free, public, and was live when I checked it before posting. Every figure above is transcribed digit for digit, unrounded, and I converted nothing into dollars.

The line, page 968 — search the signed Act for `NATIONAL FOREST GUARD`, one hit: 2026 Appropriation Act, Budget Office - "https://budgetoffice.gov.ng/index.php/2026-appropriation-act-details/2026-appropriation-act-details-pdf/download" Faster mirror, same line on page 937: PLAC copy - "https://placng.org/i/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2026-Appropriation-Act.pdf"

That it came from the Executive unchanged — 2026 Appropriation Bill (Details, 20 Dec 2025 - "https://budgetoffice.gov.ng/index.php/2026-appropriation-bill-details/2026-appropriation-bill-details/download"
Auditor-General on the 2012 accounts — paragraphs 2.79 and 2.123: [annual report]- "http://www.oaugf.ng/images/Reports/annual_report_AuGF_Nigeria_2012.pdf"

Auditor-General on the 2016 accounts — the ₦19bn and the verbal directive, printed page 291: [annual report] - "https://oaugf.ng/images/downloads/2016_Annual_Report.pdf"

The auditor on drawing money from this same vote himself — [OAuGF self-assessment, 2024 -"https://oaugf.ng/images/2024/OAuGF-SAI-PMF-Report-2024.pdf"

The vote reporting 0.00%, every month of 2019 — via the Internet Archive, because the treasury portal is unreachable: [GIFMIS monthly performance, Dec 2019 - "https://web.archive.org/web/20220804095509id_/opentreasury.gov.ng/images/2019/MonthlyBudgetPerformance/FGN/ADMIN/DEC.pdf"

468,000 federal payments, searchable, no login — [govspend.ng] - "https://www.govspend.ng". Search `ERGP14247846` and see what comes back.

The procurement portal — pick "Presidential Air Fleets (State House)" from the procuring-entity list: [NOCOPO, Bureau of Public Procurement] "https://nocopo.bpp.gov.ng/noc/frmcitizendashboard3.aspx"

The budget speech with no mention of the guard, 19 Dec 2025 — [State House] "https://statehouse.gov.ng/2026-budget-speech/"

WHAT I AM NOT SAYING

That this money has been stolen. Nothing shows that. Not that the Forest Guard is fake 7,000 men were really trained and are really out there. Not that it is illegal; the Service Wide Vote has been used this way under administrations before this one.

What I am saying is narrower. ₦283,850,000,000 was appropriated in a form that makes it permanently impossible, from the public record, to say how much went to the forests and how much went to the presidential fleet. The men it was supposed to pay say they have not been paid. And the one official who could have answered told us thirteen years ago that in this vote, he cannot.

The Budget Office does not release ₦283.85bn on a sentence. Behind that code is a worksheet with a split between fleet and force. That worksheet is the document that matters now, and I would rather five hundred Nigerians asked for it than that I wrote another thousand words about the page.

GRADES. Every budget figure, every audit quotation and every payment search above is A retrieved and read by me from the signed Act, the Auditor-General's own reports and the published payment record. No source told me any of it and nothing was leaked. That the guards are going unpaid is B: Nigerian newspapers reporting men who say so. I have not seen a payroll. The government's promise to pay them immediately is A it is in their own release.

Nothing graded A here needs my honesty to hold up. The files are public and will say the same thing to you.

If they ever stop saying it, that is the next story.

— Dr Vero

Nigeria, on the record.

Truth has a paper trail.