MDB Results 2026 · Nigeria · Day 5 of 6
When the Money Actually Works
The next day Toju took Kofi and his mother on a tour of the city. They had never seen so many government building being renovated at the same time in any city. There were workers and contractors hard at work everywhere.
Not a project site. Not a road under construction. Just a government building, ordinary, with workers outside doing ordinary work. A painter on scaffolding. A electrician running cable. A team laying tiles in the entrance hall.
“What is special about this?” Kofi asked.
“Watch them,” Toju said.
Kofi watched. The workers moved without the hesitation that he had seen at other government buildings in other cities — the stop-start of people who were not sure they would be paid for what they were doing.
“They are working,” Kofi said. “Properly working.”
“Yes. Do you know why?”
Kofi shook his head.
“Because they know they will be paid. The payment risk has been removed. The work is measured. The quality is verified. The payment goes directly to the contractor’s bank account. No running around government offices. No waiting. No middlemen.”
“Who decided this?”
“The Governor,” Toju said. “Governor Godwin Obaseki. He is a former investment banker. When he came to office, one of the first things he noticed was that contractors were not working. And he asked why.”
— Governor Godwin Obaseki, Edo State
“That is all?” Kofi said. “He just paid them?”
“To just pay them, you need a treasury single account. You need a financial management system that tracks commitments and releases funds in real time. You need procurement laws that are enforced. You need an auditor who checks the work was done. You need a payroll that is free of ghost workers so the money is there to pay the contractors. You need eight years of reform work.”
Kofi looked at the painter on the scaffolding.
“That is what public financial management is,” he said slowly. “Making sure the contractor gets paid.”
“That is what it is for,” Toju said. “Not the systems. Not the Oracle implementation or the IPSAS accounting standards or the COFOG budget classification. Those are the tools. The point is the contractor on the scaffolding.”
The SEEFOR project funded a comprehensive PFM reform programme in Edo State alongside the employment component. It took eight years. It was built in seven steps.
On the drive back, Kofi was quiet for a long time.
“Toju,” he said. “The genies in Washington. They talked about governance and public financial management for days. They had ratings and numbers and very long reports.”
“Yes,” Toju said.
“But I think the contractor on the scaffolding does not know about any of that. He just knows that the payment arrived.”
“That is correct.”
“So the whole system — the Oracle and the ERAS and the procurement cadre and the audit law — it is all just so that the contractor gets paid.”
“And the teacher,” Toju said. “And the nurse. And the road maintenance crew. And the young woman who submitted her tax return online this morning without driving to an office. Yes. That is what it is for. Everything else is the machinery. The point is the person.”
Kofi nodded. He wrote something in his notebook. His mother looked over and read it.
He had written: The point is the person. Not the system. The person.
The lesson Edo teaches is not about which system to choose. It is about sequencing and ownership. The state started by getting the legal foundations right — six laws in eight years. Then it automated what the law now permitted. Then it extended the systems downward to local governments using tools simple enough for staff who had never worked with a financial management system before. Then it used the revenue that the better systems generated to fund the employment programme. Each piece depended on the one before it.
The infrastructure mattered too. Before Oracle could work across government offices, the state needed broadband. Governor Obaseki negotiated a twenty-year PPP contract with a private operator and rolled out reliable connectivity across Benin City and all local governments. That infrastructure enabled e-procurement, digital payroll, and the ERAS tax portal. You cannot run modern financial systems on a connection that drops every hour. The broadband came first.
And the reforms reached the front line. Local government salary payments through Odoo meant that teachers and health workers and civil servants were paid on time, with proper records. This fed directly into the Governor’s flagship education programme — BEST, Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation — which required functional schools with teachers who showed up because they knew their salary would arrive. The plumbing and the programme moved in sync. That is when reform becomes real.
Nineteen Nigerian states visited to study the e-procurement model and PFM reforms. Two countries came. They did not come to study a diagnostic report. They came to see something that was working.
Edo PFM Practitioner Note 2020 ERAS Tax System — SEEFOR Presentation 2018Connected Analysis
Two papers on mdbreform.com examine the broader PFM landscape across Sub-Saharan Africa — the PEFA diagnostic framework and the AFRITAC technical assistance model — and what could be achieved if the PEFA Secretariat and Afritac could focus on supporting the basics first staretgy.
PEFA @ The Crossroads AFRITAC: An Independent Assessment