Claim: Minister of the FCT, Nyesom Wike, claimed that he inherited a monthly revenue base of N9 billion when he took charge.
Verdict: False! Data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on subnational Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) revealed that the FCT already averaged N10.36 billion monthly in 2021 and 2022, before Wike’s appointment.
Full Text
On Thursday, July 9, 2026, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, claimed that the FCT’s internally generated revenue (IGR) was “mere N9 billion” when he took office.
The Minister made this claim during his monthly media briefing in Abuja, highlighting his administration’s achievements.
“When we came on board, our IGR was a mere N9 billion a month, but as I speak to you today, we’ve been able to improve it to forty-something billion. So when people now say, ‘Oh, FCT is working, FCT is working,’ it’s working because somebody has made it work,” Wike said.
This claim has been widely circulated by mainstream newspapers, including Nigerian Tribune, BusinessDay and The Independent.
DUBAWA decided to verify the Minister’s figures given the public interest in revenue transparency and governance metrics.
Verification
We retrieved the official Subnational Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) Reports directly from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) website. We tracked data over four years (2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024) to map the true revenue baseline of the capital city before and after Wike’s arrival.
Once we downloaded the Excel sheets, we isolated the rows specifically labelled for the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Because the NBS reports annual revenue totals, we divided each year’s total revenue by 12 months. This gave us the exact monthly average for each calendar year.
What the numbers say
In both 2021 and 2022, before Wike’s appointment, FCT was annually raking in N131.92 billion and 124.37 billion, respectively. This breaks down to an average baseline of 10.99 billion and N10.36 billion every single month.
By 2023, the year he took office, the total annual revenue climbed to N211.10 billion. This is an average of N17.59 billion per month.
In 2024, the NBS data showed that the revenue surged to N282.36 billion. This brought the monthly average up to N23.53 billion.
DUBAWA could not verify the Minister’s other claim that the FCT is currently generating over N40 billion in monthly revenue. This is because, as of July 9, 2026, the NBS has not yet released the official full-year subnational IGR reports for 2025 and 2026.
Conclusion
While NBS data suggests that Minister Wike has successfully grown the FCT’s revenue since taking office, his claim about the baseline he inherited is false. The FCT was already outperforming the “N9 billion” figure two years before he stepped in.