Notwithstanding its nebulous status, the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) was able to appoint a director-general and hundreds of staff. It also secured an office space at the federal secretariat and indeed found its way into the nation’s budget with a Budget Code 0111062001 assigned to it. This huge achievement was attained by the presence in Nigeria of too many fake tendencies that can easily be put into use by some smart citizens. Although many citizens are baffled by stories of what the fake agency had done before an alarm was raised, one can conclude that many such bodies exist in our clime and that except concrete steps are taken to curtail the tendencies which give them oxygen, many more of such 419 institutions and entities will soon spring up and operate seamlessly in all the 3 arms of government.
The trend has always been with us especially in the area of manipulated payroll lists leading to many ghost workers earning huge salaries every month at all levels of government. It was even more prominent at the local government level with audit reports recording thousands of ghost workers making it difficult for any meaningful development to occur at the grassroots. At the federal level, a higher degree of audacity wrapped in negligence emerged from 2015 during the tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari. At the time, it became fashionable for government to release names of appointees to boards of public agencies featuring many dead members. It was generally believed that names of many of the appointees were inserted into the list without the knowledge of the then president. In the case of the present administration, what looks like many illegal appointments have had to be reversed.
On its part, the legislature has had a fair share of Nigeria’s fake tendencies. One of the popular instances concerns the trend whereby the presiding officer of a legislative body declares the ‘ayes’ have it to confirm the appointment of a nominee to hold a particular sensitive position whereas the legislators had in a voice vote overwhelmingly rejected the nominee. During the 9th National Assembly, I was able to confirm the observation of one analyst that whenever the deputy speaker presided, he always vetoed the wishes of the legislators in the house of representatives by wrongly announcing the ‘nays’ have it. Interestingly, such presiding officers always had their way as objections to his distortion of what truly transpired is never vigorously pursued. Unknown to the lawmakers, such postures created for the system permissible fake outcomes as a convention
A more serious irregularity in governance is seen in the sneaking of items into the annual budgets more popularly known as ‘budget padding’ or the insertion of unprogrammed appropriation. Clear evidence that our fake tendencies abound here and there lies in the fact that provisions were made in the federal budget to cover functions allocated to local and state governments. In addition, many of the seemingly innocuous items and functions are safely hidden within the budgets of Ministries, Departments and Agencies whose mandates are far away from the budgeted items. For long, this criminality was recorded with no consequences for their perpetrators thereby leaving in the subconsciousness of some citizens that toying with the country’s resources is part of the game of politics which reflects in persistent budget deficits and excessive borrowing.
It is only fair to commend the anti-corruption bodies that have tracked certain projects and forced the relevant contractors back to site. In other instances, the anti-corruption teams have also recovered billions of diverted funds. While these efforts have greatly helped the nation, it is important to find a way to bring to an end the possibility of certain persons making enormous gains from sharp practices. Otherwise, the urge to involve in the illegal activities can turn many of our institutions into fake entities. The way forward is to transform the budgetary system. If government is anxious to carry all sectors along in the governance process, the identification items for execution should be done at the beginning of the budgetary process in such a way that the process is better coordinated.
Each time the ills in government are listed, there is a tendency to imagine that the judiciary is not part of the on-going scam in Nigeria. That perception is erroneous because to start with, there are as many bad judges as we have dubious politicians. This is what explains several findings of judges even at the level of chief judges using fake affidavits sworn to in courts to alter their records. Here, we are not talking about the perverted selling of judgments but how the handling of such nefarious things can create a negative culture for the nation. One day in Nigeria, citizens woke up to hear of a court with an oral ruling that was different from the written version of the same judgment. So, who says we will not wake up one morning to find a fake court with a published budget, a court room, officials and several rulings?
We may not be able to provide a single definition for what can be regarded as a fake court order because different people can be quite subjective about what they are willing to accept. But what many people will frown at in justice delivery in a society can be quite common. For example, people are likely to disapprove of fake court orders that are procured to arrest some people or to search homes/offices of some citizens. I happen to be aware of a story of how law enforcement agents were withdrawn from a location in obedience to what was called a court order. On further enquiries, it was discovered that no court gave the said order. It was the lawyer of one of the parties that instituted a case which he packaged like a court order and ‘mobilized’ bailiffs in a particular court to serve it as if it were a court order. It didn’t involve any court or judge but the police accepted it as a court order.
It is therefore simplistic to imagine that a fake entity in the form of a court cannot emerge in the judiciary the way such entities have found their way into the other 2 arms of government. Only last week, one Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) said he has had a tough time looking for what to call an Abuja federal high court whose presiding officer had been declared unfit to be a judge by the Court of Appeal. It is indeed instructive that the declaration was made by a supervisory higher court. If the SAN seeks the help of historians, he would be told that the judge in question could strategically pass for a manufacturer – not of alcoholic beverages packaged in sachets – because NAFDAC won’t allow that. In this case, manufacturing refers to a court concocting issues not presented to it by any of the parties to a case. We shall not refer directly to the said judge because if he has faltered only the Nigerian Judicial Council NJC can sanction him.
The case which involved the request by the Forum of Former Legislators (FFL) to deregister certain political parties is quite interesting. There is nothing special about the plaintiffs, just that they appear to resemble Nzeribe’s Association for Better Nigeria ABN. Both the ABN that served as plaintiff in the 1993 case and the FFL of the 2026 case were unregistered entities. Some analysts believed that Justice Bassey Ikpeme the judge in the 1993 case wanted to use the ABN to stop the famous June 12 Presidential Election from holding? Was the 2026 judge also seeking to use the FFL to stop some parties from contesting the election? The 1993 court ignored the facts presented by the electoral commission that by law a court could not stop the election just as the 2026 court ignored the evidence of INEC that the parties met the conditions for remaining as political parties.
Considering that the NJC is the only body that can discipline judges why was the Court of Appeal so harsh on the judge in publicly accusing him of ‘judicial rascality’ and ‘judicial impertinence?’ Has the Appeal Court not already destroyed the judge before he meets with the NJC? Surprisingly the NJC has gone mute on the case. It is unfair for the NJC to delay the handling of the case after public confidence in the sharply criticised judge had been completely eroded. If we gauge public opinion correctly, we shall find that the NJC’s posture of taking its time in dealing with the case, may turn the court in question into the first fake judiciary agency to be probed.
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