A Step-by-Step Guide to Looting a Nigerian Ministry (And Retiring Comfortably)

First things first; Congratulations on your appointment, you have worked hard for this.
You have attended the right parties, shaken the right hands, and said "God bless our leader" with enough conviction that it finally paid off.

Welcome to the government, your people are proud, your village is already planning an event to celebrate your win.

Now let's talk about the next four years.

Step one is to understand that nothing you see is real.

The budget is not a plan. It is a menu.
Take the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs; billions allocated for feeding programs, and somehow the hungry stayed hungry while the consultants got fat.

You are not here to execute the budget, you are here to eat from it.

The difference between a good minister and a great one is knowing which line items are the fattest and moving
accordingly.

Step two is to find your boys.

You cannot do this alone and anyone who tries is both a fool and a liability, your boys are not your friends; they are your infrastructure.
The accountant who knows how to make numbers behave.
The contractor who can build a road on paper; those federal roads that get re-awarded every two years and somehow never finish.
The PA who has never heard anything in his life.

Invest in these people early, they are your real portfolio.

Step three is to master the procurement process.

This is where the real work happens.

You want to understand what Abdulrasheed Maina understood; that pension money is just money, and money does not care who touches it.
You inflate the contract.
You award it to a company your cousin registered last Tuesday. The company mobilizes, collects 60% upfront, and then develops a mysterious cash flow problem, the project stalls.

A new administration comes, the file gets lost, this is not corruption. This is project management.

Step four is patience.

Junior looters panic and rush.
They inflate one contract by 400% in the first quarter and wonder why EFCC is breathing down their neck by March.
You are not junior, you spread it out, you think in tranches, you are basically a portfolio manager at this point.

Study how NIMASA hemorrhaged billions over years; quietly, consistently, across multiple administrations.
That is not looting. That is legacy.

Step five, and this is important , give back.

Build one borehole. Commission one transformer.
Attend two funerals and cry at one of them. Settle the journalists that matter and ignore the ones who don't.
Nigerians are not naive, they just need enough to work with when defending you online.
Look at how a governor can share a video of handing out bags of rice and trend positively the same week an audit report surfaces.
The rice is real. Lead with the rice.

By retirement you will have a house in Maitama, something in Banana Island, a child studying in the UK on a scholarship that exists only on paper, and a chieftaincy title back home. People will call you a leader. A philanthropist. An elder statesman.

The same newspapers that ran the audit report will run your profile at 60 ; "A Life of Service."
And the ministry? Worse than you met it, but that is not your problem anymore.
Someone else's turn now.

Congratulations again. You served your country well.