‘FAKE’ AGENCY: Everyone knew something for seven months, but nobody did anything

By Gift ChapiOdekina, Abuja

Somewhere inside the Federal Secretariat Complex in Abuja, until only weeks ago, a signpost still pointed visitors toward the office of the ‘Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council.’

The council had a Director-General, a staff of 300, a line in the 2026 Appropriation Act worth N1.3 billion, and, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), two functioning accounts, including one in pounds sterling.

The only thing PFIPC did not have, the Presidency now insists, was a right to exist.

Nearly ten months after officials first quietly flagged the council as fraudulent, and weeks into a presidential probe, a National Assembly investigation, and a police manhunt, one pattern has hardened faster than any actual answer: Nobody in government will say the failure was theirs.

The agency that wasn’t

The scandal centres on Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, who allegedly presented forged documents, including a letter bearing the falsified signature of the President’s Chief of Staff, Mr Femi Gbajabiamila, to establish himself as Director-General of a council the Presidency says was never legally created.

Using that paper trail, Adeyemi allegedly secured office space at the Federal Secretariat, opened bank accounts with the CBN, deployed staff, and got PFIPC written into the nation’s budget under code 0111062001, comprising over N1 billion in recurrent costs and N300 million in capital expenditure.

President Bola Tinubu has ordered the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to investigate, giving it 30 days to report back. The House of Representatives has convened its own ad-hoc committee.

Police have declared Adeyemi wanted.

And, on Monday, July 20, Gbajabiamila himself appeared before ICPC investigators not as a witness alone, but as the man whose office the forged letter claimed to speak for.

The first warning

…and the silence that followed

What has turned this from a fraud story into an institutional reckoning is the timeline. According to Presidency and civil service sources, the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Office of the Chief of Staff, the Office of the National Security Adviser, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Nigeria Police had all identified problems with Adeyemi’s claims as far back as November 2025.

Gbajabiamila wrote to the Inspector-General of Police and the Director-General of the State Security Service in October 2025 alleging forgery. He wrote again to the Foreign Affairs Minister on October 27, and to the SGF on November 5, disclaiming the council entirely.

Yet no public disclaimer followed for about seven months, not until June 2026, by which time PFIPC had already been folded into a national budget that had passed through committee scrutiny in both chambers of the National Assembly and been signed into law by the president himself.

That gap between private knowledge and public silence is the space in which the blame game now lives.

Everyone knew something

…but nobody did anything.
Piece together the submissions so far and a strange consensus emerges: Every institution touched the file, and every institution insists it did the right thing at the time.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the House committee it never dealt with PFIPC, that no Memorandum of Understanding or investment agreement was ever signed through the council, and that when Adeyemi approached the ministry three times seeking backing for an investment summit, the requests were simply never acted upon.

The Head of Civil Service of the Federation, Mrs Didi Walson-Jack, told the same panel her office never approved PFIPC’s organisational structure “for lack of proper documentation” and never deployed staff to it even as the CBN’s Director of Banking confirmed the council held two accounts with the apex bank.

The National Security Adviser’s office says it told the system, back in November 2025, that PFIPC was not recognised.

The House committee’s own chairman has now asked the obvious follow-up question: If ONSA knew that in November, what did anyone do about it afterward? NSA Nuhu Ribadu has since been summoned to answer.

Even the National Assembly, whose own budget process let a fictitious agency through every stage of legislative scrutiny, has offered an explanation that shifts responsibility elsewhere.

Lawmakers argue the Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2007 already obliges the Budget Office of the Federation to submit a certified list of agencies, complete with their instruments of establishment ahead of every Appropriation Bill, precisely so that entities without legal backing cannot be admitted.

If that list was faulty or the vetting was skipped, the implication runs, the failure sits upstream of the chamber, not inside it.

One committee source has been blunter still, describing the allocation as having entered “through a backdoor arrangement” without a budget defence meaning, on this account, that PFIPC was never even properly scrutinised by the committees whose job it was to ask what the agency was and what it did.

Perhaps the most telling assessment so far comes from a senator who conceded, in remarks reported ahead of Senate plenary, that mistakes were spread across “the House of Representatives, the Head of Service, the Budget Office” — before adding a caveat that some responsibility sits at a level “you can’t readily blame,” what he called the grundnorm, the foundational assumption everyone else’s paperwork rests on.

‘Not a political exercise’ — but one that keeps finding new hands to point

When Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Abbas Tajudeen, inaugurated the ad-hoc committee on Monday, July 20, he framed the exercise in almost defensive terms, insisting the probe was “not constituted to validate speculation or amplify controversy,” and that “neither is this a political exercise.”

His charge to the committee was blunt about what he did not want to see from witnesses: “This House expects the truth, not rehearsed scripts or defensive posturing.”

Nigerians, he said, “deserve explanations that withstand scrutiny.”

It is a standard that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ own submission, filed the very next day, illustrates the difficulty of.

In a formal reply to the committee, dated July 21 and signed by the Permanent Secretary, Ambassador Dr Dunoma Umar Ahmed, the ministry account reads less like an admission of any lapse than a careful demonstration of process followed.

It states that Adeyemi “approached the Ministry on three (3) different occasions” seeking backing for a World Investment Summit, but that “guided by extant rules and regulations as well as the necessity of carrying out due diligence,” the ministry “did not take any action on the requests.”

The letter goes further, listing six separate denials of involvement that the ministry “did not participate in any diplomatic engagement, bilateral and multilateral discussions held by the PFIPC,” that no “Memorandum of Understanding” was ever signed, and that “no Nigerian Mission had interaction with the PFIPC.”

It closes on a single unambiguous line: “The Ministry has never had any official interaction or engagement with the PFIPC or its alleged Director-General.”

That posture of full disclosure of no contact, paired with a flat denial of responsibility, echoed almost everywhere the paper trail leads.

The answer that raises a bigger question

Buried inside the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s own defence is the detail that has most alarmed the committee: It wrote to the Office of the National Security Adviser on October 16, 2025, “requesting clarification on the status of Prince Adeyemi Adeniyi Matthew as Director-General of the PFIPC.” The ONSA’s answer came back over a month later, on November 26, 2025, stating that checks with the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation and the Office of the Chief of Staff had confirmed that “Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Mathew is unknown to any office of the Federal Government.”

In other words: as early as the closing months of 2025, Nigeria’s security establishment had, on record, dismissed PFIPC’s Director-General as a nobody — seven months before the public would hear the word ‘scandal.’

The committee chairman, Hon. Yusuf Gagdi, did not hide his frustration with what happened, or rather did not happen, next. “What have you done as an office that has the power and capacity to carry out further investigation in respect of this matter?” he asked, directing the question squarely at ONSA.

“If they discovered that the agency does not exist, then appropriate action ought to have been taken. They should come before this Committee and explain the actions they have taken.”

NSA Ribadu has since been summoned to appear.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry, for its part, insists it had already done its job simply by asking the question and declining Adeyemi’s requests.

The committee’s implicit rebuttal is that knowing a ‘Director-General’ was fake and doing nothing further about the machinery still operating in his name are two very different things.

A committee running out of patience

By Tuesday evening, that frustration had hardened into something closer to an ultimatum.
In a press statement, the ad-hoc committee announced it was issuing “the final notice to all defaulting Ministries, Departments and Agencies” that had ignored its invitations, warning that non-appearance was “a serious affront to the constitutional oversight powers of the House of Representatives.”

The statement left little room for institutions still weighing whether to show up. “Invitations issued by a duly constituted Committee of the House of Representatives are not matters of discretion,” it read, citing Sections 88 and 89 of the 1999 Constitution.

“Compliance is therefore a legal obligation, not an act of courtesy.”

Any agency that failed to appear, it warned, would face the committee invoking “every constitutional and statutory power available to the House of Representatives to compel compliance and ensure accountability,” including sanctions against “any person or institution that deliberately obstructs or frustrates this investigation.”

Thursday, the statement made clear, was “the final opportunity for every defaulting agency to comply voluntarily.”

Even here, though, the committee was careful to insist the probe was institutional rather than personal in its target, the statement stressed the investigation “is not targeted at any individual or institution but is aimed at establishing the facts.”

Whether that framing survives contact with Thursday’s hearings, where ONSA and the Foreign Affairs Minister herself are now expected to appear in person, may determine whether the PFIPC probe finally produces an institution willing to say the failure was its own or simply adds another round of documented denials to the pile.

Budget Office: ‘Not one Naira,’ and not our fault either

If any single appearance before the ad-hoc committee has captured the shape of this scandal, it came on Friday, July 24, when the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Mr Tanimu Yakubu, took his turn at the witness table and delivered, line-by-line, the most complete distancing exercise yet.

Yakubu’s defence rested on two pillars. The first: That despite N1.3 billion sitting in the 2026 Appropriation Act under PFIPC’s name, not a single kobo ever left the treasury. “Not one naira of the personnel provision has been drawn,” he told lawmakers.

“There is no personnel expenditure to recover because no expenditure ever occurred.”

The N200 million overhead line, he said, was never released either, since “treasury warrants and cash backing were never issued,” while the N300 million capital vote “never progressed beyond the appropriation stage”, no Ministerial Tenders Board approval, no Certificate of No Objection, no treasury warrant.

His words: “The law did not recover money after it had gone. It prevented the expenditure before it began.”

The second pillar was jurisdictional.

The Budget Office, Yakubu insisted, was never in the business of vetting whether PFIPC itself was real or not.

“The Budget Office did not create the council. It did not assign its budget code. It did not approve its establishment. It did not grant its recruitment waiver,” he said.

“It received official instruments and did what the law required of it. It measured their fiscal effect.”

When the council itself requested N3.8 billion for personnel costs, he said the office rejected that figure outright and substituted its own independently calculated N802.98 million “not a concession to the council,” he stressed, but “the Budget Office’s own fiscal proposal.”

It was a committee member, Abubakar Fulata, who supplied the piece the Budget Office’s account left hanging: That the document underpinning the whole exercise didn’t survive basic scrutiny.

Fulata told the hearing the purported Act establishing PFIPC carried no gazette number, no signature from the Clerk of the National Assembly, and no evidence of presidential assent, meaning, in his words, that “it did not carry the gazette number, it did not have the signature of the Clerk of the National Assembly and it did not carry the signature of Mr. President.”

He also faulted the agencies involved for never checking the document before acting on it.
Remarkably, rather than pressing that gap, committee chairman Yusuf Gagdi effectively absolved the Budget Office of blame.

“The question is whether the Budget Office allocated budget to this agency without the agency satisfying the requirements. The answer, based on the documents before us, is no. I repeat, no,” Gagdi said, adding that the office had “acted on approvals issued by the relevant government agencies” that were “later discovered to be forged.”

In doing so, Gagdi effectively relocated the entire inquiry one level upstream: “The agency satisfied all the requirements the Budget Office needed before allocating a budget. The issue now is whether those documents were genuine. That is what this committee is investigating.”

It is a small but telling moment in the arc of this scandal, the point at which the parliament conducting the probe began, in effect, pre-clearing one of its own witnesses of wrongdoing even as the hunt for whoever forged the enabling documents, and whoever failed to check them, continues.

The Accountant-General of the Federation is now expected before the committee on Monday to explain how PFIPC obtained a budget code in the first place, the next link in a chain where, so far, every institution that has spoken has offered an explanation of what it did correctly, and none has yet explained who, if anyone, got it wrong.

The questions nobody has answered

A report has now named at least 12 officials and agencies who signed off on the letters, approvals and access that gave PFIPC its shell of legitimacy from the SGF’s Office down to Directors at the CBN and NITDA. Investigators, the report notes, have yet to question the individuals who actually signed those enabling documents.

The police probe, notably, has not linked any government or civil service official to Adeyemi’s alleged fraud, a finding that leaves the paper trail of enablement dangling without an owner.

Editorial voices have started to say plainly what officials will not.

One commentary described the episode as a story not about Gbajabiamila against Adeyemi, but about systemic failure, warning that until the system is fixed, “the next Adeyemi is somewhere forging another letterhead.”

Another public interest group has asked the government to simply answer, in full, who proposed the allocation, which institutions processed and approved it, and whether any of the N1.3 billion was ever actually released.

What comes next?

ICPC’s 30-day clock is running.

The House ad-hoc committee has summoned the SGF, the NSA, and other officials still to testify, notably, without inviting either Gbajabiamila or Adeyemi themselves to the same table, a gap one committee member has already flagged as undermining the probe’s credibility.

Until one of these parallel investigations produces a finding that survives the next round of denials, the PFIPC affair will likely remain what it has been since June: A scandal with a forged signature, a real budget line, and, for now, no institution willing to say the failure began with them.

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