Wednesday 15 April, 2026

Nigeria paid $460 million for cameras to watch Abuja. This week, the company that installed them admitted it doesn't know if they still work.

In 2010, the Federal Government borrowed $460 million from China's Exim Bank and handed the contract to ZTE Corporation, a Chinese telecoms firm.

The brief was simple enough. Install CCTV cameras across Abuja. Thousands of them. Cover the roads, the junctions, the markets. Build the infrastructure of a city that can watch itself. Keep people safe.

ZTE built the system. Installed the cameras. Then handed it over after six months of maintenance and left.

That was 2012.

On Tuesday, a representative from ZTE appeared before the House of Representatives Ad-Hoc Committee investigating the project. Committee chairman Donald Ojogo asked the company to account for what it had built.

Irene Momoh, speaking for ZTE, confirmed the infrastructure was delivered and installed between 2011 and 2012. Then he was asked whether the cameras are still working.

"To the best of our knowledge, the equipment was delivered and installed within the project timeline," Momoh said. "But I cannot confirm its present operational status."

He cannot confirm whether the cameras work. The company that built them, that was paid to build them, that is still owed $15.37 million in outstanding loan repayments as of March 2026, cannot say whether the cameras are on.

What did Nigeria actually get for $460 million?

The loan was drawn from a $600 million soft credit facility. Ten-year grace period. Another ten years for repayment. Concessional interest rates. The kind of terms that feel generous until you realise you've spent 15 years paying for something that may have stopped working before the ink dried on the handover documents.

Abuja residents know what the cameras didn't prevent. Kidnappings in the capital have continued. The lawmaker who moved the original motion to investigate, Amobi Ogah, put it plainly in the House: crime has soared in Abuja despite this huge investment.

The machinery behind this failure is not complicated. It has two moving parts.

The first is the handover gap. ZTE's maintenance agreement ran for three months. They extended it voluntarily to six, then left. Nobody in the Nigerian government built a maintenance framework for what came after. Nobody budgeted for upkeep. Nobody designated which agency would own the system operationally once ZTE was gone. The cameras were installed into a vacuum.

The second is the loan structure. Nigeria owes the money regardless of whether the cameras work. That's not unique to this contract. It is the standard architecture of how Nigeria borrows. The accountability for delivery and the obligation to repay sit in separate silos. One is tied to a contract. The other is tied to a sovereign credit arrangement. When delivery fails, the repayment clock doesn't stop.

Has this happened before?

The Jukwaa Lane. The Ajegunle Road. The IDP camp at Rann in Borno, bombed in 2017 with 112 killed because intelligence said insurgents were there. Nigeria's infrastructure and security history is full of this. The state announces a solution, procures it at significant cost, and the maintenance phase collapses because nobody planned for the part after the ribbon cutting.

The CCTV contract was signed in 2010 under Jonathan. Buhari came and went. Tinubu is here now. The loan has survived all three. The cameras have not.

What this costs the person without connections

The person this story belongs to is not the lawmaker asking the questions on Tuesday. It's the resident of Maitama or Garki who has spent 14 years believing there was a surveillance system watching their street. It's the market trader in Wuse who assumed that investment in Abuja's security had translated into something real. It's the civil servant who pays taxes into a federal system that borrowed $460 million in their name and cannot confirm the result is still switched on.

The CBN has now been directed to suspend further disbursements to ZTE pending satisfactory documentation. ZTE has been ordered to return with documentation. A full inventory of all equipment supplied and installed. Precise locations of all infrastructure nationwide. The identities and contact details of the 456 Nigerians allegedly trained to operate the system.

That list of requirements is revealing. After 15 years, the Nigerian government doesn't have a verified inventory of what was installed. It doesn't have precise locations. It doesn't have a list of who was trained. It has a loan. That's what it can confirm.

The CBN freeze is the right move. But a freeze on future payments doesn't recover the money already spent. And the money already spent bought Abuja cameras that nobody can say are working.

Nigeria didn't lose $460 million to ZTE. It lost $460 million to the version of itself that signed that contract without building anything around it to make it last.

That version isn't gone. It's still here. You can tell because the loan is still running.