We kept looking for Nigeria’s public records. Then we put 1.5 million of them in one place.
A government document can be public and still be almost impossible to find. It may sit on a ministry website with a broken search function, disappear when the site is redesigned, or survive only as an old copy someone happened to save. That makes it harder to check what was budgeted, what was promised, and what later changed.
So we built the Vero Archive: one searchable place for Nigerian public records. The catalogue currently contains 1,554,554 records from 71 sources, including budgets, audit reports, official gazettes, court judgments, procurement records and international documents concerning Nigeria. We have kept 86,280 files, including government documents recovered after they vanished from gov.ng.
The collection reaches from colonial-era material to current public finance records. You can search across federal and state documents, look up a name or company, or follow a particular budget line into the underlying file. We keep each file as published, record its SHA-256 fingerprint and link to where we found it. The archive does not turn a document into an allegation. It gives you the document so you can examine it yourself.
This is one part of what VERO RECORD is building. Our investigations will show the evidence behind their findings, while the archive lets readers, journalists and researchers search the wider record independently.
The Record opens 1 October.
Truth has a paper trail.
About this dispatch
This is a public post by Dr Vero, archived here as published, with its full text and every graphic that accompanied it. Dispatches are written for a general audience and are not graded: they are a record of what was said publicly and when, not a sourced report.
Graded, document-sourced reporting is kept separate, in the newsroom and the dossiers.