The Real Cost Of Kwara’s Elephant Projects

By Adeniyi Ìṣhọlá

Last week, the Kwara State Government inaugurated the Kwara Revenue House amid fanfare. The building is undeniably imposing, flashy, grand, and visually striking. It beautifies its surroundings and generates strong political optics for an administration that has become remarkably adept at constructing magnificent but irrelevant and wasteful projects in strategically visible locations.

But beyond the aesthetics and the optics, what real, tangible, and measurable value does the Kwara Revenue House deliver to the average Kwaran? This is a question the government has conspicuously failed to answer. And it is a question that, when asked about project after project executed by the Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq administration, produces the same uncomfortable silence.

Was there really a need for this elaborate Revenue House? The Kwara Internal Revenue Service (KWIRS) exists to collect taxes and generate revenue for the state. Its effectiveness is determined by the quality of its systems, the capacity of its personnel, the robustness of its technology, and the strength of its compliance framework — certainly not by the size or grandeur of the building it occupies. Does the size of a revenue agency’s headquarters even determine how much revenue it generates? The answer, obviously, is no.

Consider this: the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS), which generates more than ten times what KWIRS generates annually, does not need a structure of this scale to demonstrate its capacity to collect taxes. If Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and its highest-generating state, can run a world-class revenue agency without an ostentatious headquarters, what precisely justifies Kwara building one?

The Abdulrazaq government has not told Kwarans how much the Revenue House cost. That alone is a scandal. Public funds were committed to this project over a period of at least three years, yet the total expenditure remains undisclosed. Also, there is no record that the project was subjected to competitive public tender. The contract was awarded in secrecy, the cost has been kept from public view, and when concerned Kwarans began asking questions, the government responded not with transparency but with deception.

The government specifically claimed that the Revenue House was built with savings from consultancy fees that would otherwise have been paid. That claim deserves scrutiny, particularly against the information emerging from KWIRS’ own budgetary allocations. Available budget figures cited in the course of writing this piece indicate that more than N16 billion was allocated to consultancy payments over a three-year period by KWIRS, an amount that is larger than what the agency budgeted for salaries of its staff. If the Revenue Service is still budgeting billions of naira for consultants, Kwarans want to know what exactly were the consultancy savings that supposedly financed the Revenue House.

KWIRS is not only still paying consultants. It is paying them at an escalating and alarming rate. The government’s claim of building the Revenue House from consultancy savings is not a misstatement. It is a deliberate lie, a calculated attempt to prevent Kwarans from asking how much of their money was spent on a building whose cost has been hidden from them. The government must come clean. It must disclose the exact amount spent on the Revenue House. If consultancy savings truly financed the building, let the government publish the figures: how much would have been paid to consultants, how much was actually saved, when were the savings made, and how much of those savings was spent on the Revenue House?

If the Revenue House represents one dimension of the Abdulrazaq administration’s crooked spending priorities, the renovation of Kwara Hotel represents its most extravagant and indefensible project. The numbers tell a story that no amount of government spin can sanitise.

When the project commenced, the government told the public that the renovation would cost N17.8 billion. That figure was already outrageous and difficult to justify. In just little over a year, the renovation cost ballooned to N27 billion, which is N9.2 billion above the already controversial initial announced cost. With no disclosure from the state government, public discussions are now putting the eventual expenditure at N30 billion or more.

It is important to recall that when the Kwara Hotel renovation project was originally put out to bid, companies that participated in the initial bidding process submitted quotations in the range of N3 billion to N3.5 billion. How then does a project estimated at N3.5 billion by professional construction companies end up costing N27 billion within a two-year period? What additional works justified the escalation? What variations were approved? What is the final contract sum? How much has actually been paid? And what is the projected final cost? These are questions agitating the minds of this writer and other concerned Kwarans.

The government’s communication machinery has attempted to justify these costs with figures that have proven to be false. One of the governor’s spokespersons, Ibraheem Abdullateef, recently appeared on a radio programme and claimed that the renovated hotel has ten lifts, each costing between N600 million and N1 billion. This was definitely a fabrication, constructed on the spot to make the exorbitant N30 billion renovation cost reasonable. It is also inconceivable that a hotel of Kwara Hotel’s size and configuration would require ten lifts, Governor Abdulrazaq’s aides would say anything, no matter how ridiculous, to defend their paymaster.

Beyond the dishonesty, there is the fundamental question of economic sense. How sound is it for a state grappling with a significant infrastructure deficit to spend N30 billion renovating a single hotel? How telling is it that the two most expensive projects this government has undertaken are the renovation of a hotel and the construction of a revenue agency’s building? What does that say about a government’s sense of priority? Is a renovated hotel truly the best use of N30 billion in a state where several critical roads are in disrepair, where hospitals are understaffed and ill-equipped, where schools sit in dilapidated conditions, and where Kwarans are forced to travel outside the state to access CT scan and MRI services because the state cannot provide them?

The Revenue House and the hotel renovation do not exist in isolation. They are part of a broader and deeply concerning pattern of capital-intensive, optics-driven spending that has defined the Abdulrazaq administration’s approach to governance from its earliest days.

On the same Ahmadu Bello Way in Ilorin where the Kwara Revenue House and the renovated Kwara Hotel stand, the state government has been constructing an International Conference Centre (ICC) for more than four years. The facility, which includes conference halls and a hotel, has consumed billions of naira and remains uncompleted. One must ask the obvious question: why is the government building another hotel inside the ICC while simultaneously spending nearly thirty billion naira to renovate Kwara Hotel, located less than 500 metres away? What gap does the ICC hotel fill that the renovated Kwara Hotel cannot?

If that duplication were not enough, the government has also committed to spending N10 billion to build a Convention Centre in Ilorin—yet another capital-intensive facility whose construction is proceeding even as the International Conference Centre remains unfinished. Why build a convention centre when a conference centre is still under construction? What is the difference in their intended functions? What economic logic justifies this apparent multiplication of similar facilities at enormous public expense? These are questions of basic fiscal responsibility and common sense that the government must provide answers to.

Let us, for a moment, consider what the resources committed to these projects could have delivered if invested in the areas where Kwarans need help most urgently. Imagine what the billions of naira wasted on these projects could mean if directed towards projects with direct and measurable impact on ordinary people.

These huge funds could have resurfaced hundreds of kilometres of urban and rural roads across Kwara, connecting communities, reducing transport costs, and opening up economic opportunities for farmers, traders, and small business owners. It could have equipped and fully staffed dozens of primary healthcare centres across the state, reducing maternal and infant mortality rates that continue to define health outcomes in Kwara. It could have provided CT scan and MRI machines to state hospitals, ending the heartbreaking reality of Kwarans travelling to other states for basic diagnostic services at higher costs and greater risks. It could have built and equipped schools, provided scholarships, funded agricultural programmes, created jobs for restless young people, and invested in the kind of infrastructure that generates economic activity and improves lives across generations.

Instead, the funds went into a hotel renovation, a grandiose revenue house, a conference centre, a convention centre and a visual art centre that has remained shut after more than two years of its completion. These are mostly irrelevant projects concentrated in a single corridor of the state capital, designed to impress visitors and generate political talking points, but offering little to nothing to the farmer in Baruten, the patient in Ekiti, the student in Irepodun, or the trader in Ilorin’s markets who struggles daily with the accumulated consequences of eight years of misplaced governance priorities.

Were these the best possible use of Kwara’s resources? The Abdulrazaq administration must justify, with credible economic arguments rather than political talking points, why a state with Kwara’s infrastructural deficit and developmental needs chose to spend its resources on monuments rather than on the people. Because at the end of the day, the true measure of a government is not the grandeur of the structures it leaves behind. It is the quality of the lives it improved while it had the power to do so.

*Isola writes from Ilorin