The presidency has earmarked N215,816,088 for the Office of the Chief Economic Adviser to the President (OCEAP). This is contained in the 2024 appropriation bill President Bola Tinubu submitted to the National Assembly.

This office, FIJ has learned, has only had one short-term occupier since Goodluck Jonathan stopped being president in 2015. Its official website, www.oceap.gov.ng, leads nowhere, as FIJ found after testing on various browsers across a range of networks.

Listed as the 15th item on page four of the 2,290-page appropriation bill, the OCEAP has zero personnel provision. A personnel cost is allocated for staff salaries and expenses related to occupiers of positions in that office.

At zero, it means no one is getting paid for occupying the office. However, the entirety of the allocation is earmarked for overhead and capital expenditure at N76,146,337 and N139,669,751 respectively.

FIJ checked for line items listed as capital and overhead expenditure and found the most expensive projected cost to be a N13.9 million for miscellaneous items.

Listed under the miscellaneous provision are “refreshement and meals, honorarium and sitting allowance, publicity and advertisements, postages and courier services, and annual budget expenses and administration”.

“These costs a total of N13,935,540,” the budget reads.

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N13,300,673 is also allocated for “maintenance of motor vehicle, maintenance of office furniture, maintenance of office building, maintenance of office/IT equipment, and maintenance of plants/generators.”

For N10,384,680, the OCEAP would be getting materials and supplies, with the most expensive supplies being office stationeries/computer consumables at N4,458,899, and newspapers at N2,440,000.

OCEAP’s HISTORY

In August 2010, Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s president at the time, appointed Precious Garba as his chief economic adviser. She occupied the office until 2015, and after Muhammadu Buhari became president, the country had no CEA until Doyin Salami occupied the position in January 2022.

Buhari led the country from 2015 to 2023, and for seven of those years, he did so without a CEA. Nigeria suffered two recessions during that time. The Katsina-born president was the first to lead the country without a CEA, and Tinubu has become the second.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo appointed Philip Asiodu as his CEA upon assuming office in 1999. Asiodu resigned in 2001, and Magnus Kpakol replaced him immediately.
   
President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua appointed Tanimu Yakubu Kurfi as Chief Economic Adviser, and when Goodluck Jonathan took the oath of office to complete Yar’Adua’s term, he appointed Precious Garba.

As of 2021, six years into Buhari’s tenure, over N543.66 million had been cumulatively allocated to the OCEAP despite no one occupying the office.

On September 16, 2023, Tinubu appointed Tope Fasua as his special adviser on economic affairs, and while some may mistake this role for CEA, it is not.

Adeyemi Dipeolu occupied the same position under Buhari, and when the OCEAP budgets came under scrutiny then, the president’s media aide told a newspaper that Dipeolu was not occupying the vacant office.

History suggests the country does not fare well without a CEA to the President, but it remains to be seen where this budgetary allocation will go, who shows up to defend it at the National Assembly and who will speak to the budget’s performance at the end of the fiscal year.