Political Finance Knowledge Centre

When campaigns are financed by undisclosed or illicit money, the winners take office already indebted to their financiers. That debt is repaid with public contracts, appointments, and regulatory forbearance.

Every naira spent above the legal limit is a naira that must eventually be recovered — most often from the public treasury via inflated procurement, ghost projects, and captured agencies.

Political finance is therefore the upstream cause of most downstream corruption. Fixing it is the single highest-leverage anti-corruption reform.

UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) Article 7(3): States shall enhance transparency in the funding of candidatures and political parties.

OECD Framework on Financing Democracy: recommends spending limits, real-time disclosure, independent oversight, and effective sanctions.

International IDEA Political Finance Database: benchmarks Nigeria against 180+ countries on contribution limits, public funding, and disclosure regimes.

GRECO (Group of States against Corruption) standards on transparency of political party funding.

Electoral Act 2022 §88: sets hard candidate spending limits — Presidential ₦5B, Governorship ₦1B, Senate ₦100M, House of Reps ₦70M, State Assembly & LG Chair ₦30M.

§89: prohibits anonymous donations above ₦50,000 and caps individual contributions to a candidate at ₦50M.

§90: parties must submit annual audited financial statements to INEC.

§91–92: INEC has power to sanction breaches with fines and, in extreme cases, forfeiture of office. To date, no candidate has been sanctioned under §88.

2019 Presidential: Independent monitors estimated combined APC/PDP spending at 20–30× the statutory ceiling; no INEC enforcement followed.

2023 Presidential: Meta Ads Library alone showed over ₦2.5B in digital ad spending by top three campaigns — a category not itemised in any submitted return.

Sub-national: multiple 2019 and 2023 governorship races featured helicopter tours, celebrity endorsements and mass welfare distribution whose logistics alone exceeded the ₦1B ceiling.

CDD West Africa: Money and Politics in Nigeria's 2023 General Elections.

YIAGA Africa: Watching the Vote — Election Finance Observation Reports.

Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism: State Capture and Public Procurement in Nigeria.

Transparency International Nigeria: Political Integrity Assessment.

Real-time disclosure: candidates and parties should file weekly income/expenditure returns during the campaign, published in machine-readable form.

Beneficial ownership transparency: every corporate donor must disclose ultimate beneficial owners in the CAC register before donating.

Digital ad transparency mandate: extend Electoral Act coverage to all paid political advertising on Meta, Google, TikTok and X.

Independent Political Finance Unit inside INEC with prosecutorial authority and dedicated forensic accountants.

Automatic disqualification for candidates found to have exceeded §88 limits by more than 2×.