Nigeria's Open Contracting Portal Now Carries a N1,999,836,220 COVID-19 Line for University College Hospital Ibadan That Was Not on the Same Report in June 2023

The Bureau of Public Procurement publishes a standing page on the Nigeria Open Contracting Portal headed COVID-19 EMERGENCY PROCUREMENT. It is a table of line items grouped by ministry, department and agency, with columns for project title, contractor, contract sum, source of funding, completion period, project status and items. It carries no award date. We retrieved sixteen archived captures of that page, from 23 June 2020 to 18 May 2026.

In the capture of 18 May 2026 the page contains a block headed UNIVERSITY COLLEGE HOSPITAL IBADAN with six rows and a published grand total of N2,162,274,576.00. Row five reads MOLECULAR LABORATORY CONSUMABLES, contractor INQABA BIOTEC WEST AFRICA LTD, contract sum N1,999,836,220.00, source of funding COVID 19 Intervention Fund, completion period 7 days, project status Completed. That single row is 92.49 per cent of the hospital's block.

Summing the twenty-five grand totals the page itself prints, the whole national report comes to N25,526,583,676.89. The N1,999,836,220.00 line is 7.83 per cent of that, and it is the largest single line item on the page. The next largest we found are N1,440,558,000.00 for SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR test kits and N1,440,200,000.00 for PCR test kits, both under the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.

The same six-row block names the same supplier twice, in two forms. Row three reads INQABA BIOTEC WEST AFRICA LIMITED, N20,200,000.00, for two laboratory grade refrigerators and freezers with a solar inverter system, completion period 14 days. Row five reads INQABA BIOTEC WEST AFRICA LTD. We searched the Corporate Affairs Commission public register on 23 September 2026 for INQABA and it returned one entity: INQABA BIOTEC WEST AFRICA LIMITED, type COMPANY, RC 1232028, date of registration 18 December 2014, status ACTIVE.

The company is not obscure. Its South African parent publishes a page describing Inqaba Biotec West Africa as its subsidiary, incorporated in 2014 and based in Ibadan, and a July 2020 post announcing a move to new premises in the city. The registration date on that page and the registration date on the Commission's record agree. This is an operating genomics laboratory in the same city as the hospital, registered more than five years before the pandemic. Nothing here is a company formed to catch a contract.

What moves is the record, not the company. The block is absent from the captures of 7 March 2023 and 5 June 2023, and present in the capture of 19 May 2024 and in every capture we retrieved after it. The archive we queried holds no capture of the page between those two dates, so the window is 5 June 2023 to 19 May 2024. In the same interval one unrelated line changed value on the page: printing and supply of flip charts on COVID-19 for community volunteers moved from N26,308,930.00 to N26,371,510.00.

We put the question to the page's own columns and they do not answer it. The portal gives no award date, no procurement method, no reference number and no publication date for any row, so the page cannot say when the contract was made, when it was reported to the Bureau, or when it was added. A report of emergency spending that acquires its single largest entry three to four years after the emergency, and renders one supplier's name two ways in one table, is a record that has to be read with its own timestamps beside it.

What this rests on

The presence, absence and exact wording of rows in sixteen dated captures of one government page, the arithmetic of the totals that page prints itself, and one register entry matched by exact name. Every figure, name and date was read off records we retrieved ourselves.

What this does not establish

The record does not establish when the contract was awarded, signed or paid; the page has no award-date column. We do not know whether the entry is late reporting, a late upload, a data migration, a correction, or something else. Allocated is not released, released is not spent, and a row marked Completed on a procurement portal is not proof that money moved or that goods arrived. It does not establish that the sum was the wrong price for the goods described: we have no specification, no quantity we can read, and no comparator contract. It does not establish that anything improper occurred, by the hospital, the Bureau, the company or any person, and we allege none. The two name forms in one table establish an inconsistency in how the portal writes a supplier's name; they do not establish that two companies exist or that anyone intended the difference. The register record establishes a registration date, a number and a status, and nothing about who owns, controls or benefits from the company. Absence from an archive capture is absence from that capture, not evidence about what the Bureau held internally.