Fake Agency, Real System Failure

For months now, one Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew has been alleged to have run   a government agency the presidency now insists never existed. Adeniyi served as Director General of a federal agency called the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIC), later renamed the Presidential Economic Advisory Council. He says he was appointed and set up the organisation in 2024, but no exact date was given . When asked for the letter of appointment he received on a telephone interview with Channels TV, he refrains from sharing it, saying it is a court matter and he cannot comment. This is a claim the presidency disputes entirely, and court filings in his criminal case place his alleged impersonation of a director general between 2024 and 2025. He was allocated  an office on the second floor of Phase III of the Federal Secretariat Complex in Abuja, a working government website, meetings with foreign ambassadors, and a request from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs  for US visa facilitation for his staff. His council also appeared in Nigeria’s 2026 Appropriation Bill with an allocation reported at either roughly 1.3 billion Naira  or, in Adeyemi’s own figure, 27.4 billion Naira  as a take-off grant.

The presidency insists none of this was real. All of it, somehow, moved through the machinery of the state as though it were. How did a supposedly fake agency manage to operate within the system at all?

In September 2025, the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) complained about another outfit  operating in its lane and distributed its organisation — the outfit being the Prince Adeniyi-led PFIC. The Foreign Affairs Ministry wrote to the Secretary to the Government of the Federation that same month seeking clarification. By October 21, the OSGF’s General Services Office had replied in writing that the council was not a recognised federal body and had no legal backing. That Nigerian parastatals and officials are still communicating via written letters in 2026 remains a wonder to observers.

On October 10, Adeyemi met with some ambassadors at the Wells Carlton Hotel in Abuja without informing the Foreign Affairs Ministry, which complained to the National Security Adviser and the Chief of Staff five days later. On October 17, Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila petitioned the DSS and police, describing forged appointment letters bearing his falsified signature and seals. The NSA’s office forwarded the matter to the OSGF on October 20. The OSGF, apparently unsatisfied, wrote directly to the Chief of Staff’s office on October 29 asking him to confirm or deny the appointment himself, a request the letter said had become necessary because several bodies were asking the same question and getting no clear answer.

That a letter of this kind had to travel from the nation’s most senior civil servant (the SGF) to the President’s own Chief of Staff, rather than the other way around, is one of the more telling details in the whole timeline. Gbajabiamila’s office issued its formal written denial on November 5, nearly two months after the first internal complaint and after Adeyemi had already been arrested.

That delay is important to note because Gbajabiamila’s office sits at the centre of the affair. It was his letterhead that was forged, it was his office that first petitioned security agencies, and it has also had to issue at least two public disclaimers, one around Adeyemi’s arrest and a second on June 8, 2026, after Adeyemi resurfaced with fresh claims. Yet, other institutions, including the OSGF and the Foreign Affairs Ministry, flagged the council as fraudulent well before his office produced its own definitive rebuttal.

Police arrested Adeyemi on October 27 at the Secretariat office he operated from, recovering documents there and at his residence in Suleja. He told investigators one Dolapo Babatunde Tanimola had helped him procure the forged letter. Tanimola, police found, had already died in a hotel fire in Abuja on October 22, five days before the arrest. Investigators say Adeyemi operated 34 bank accounts, nine under fictitious agency names, and, most remarkably, an account with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) itself, opened using forged documents that misled the Accountant General’s office. No government money is alleged to have moved through it. Adeyemi and two accomplices were charged on eight counts at the Federal High Court in November 2025. The case is scheduled to be heard on July 27, 2026.

While on bail, Adeyemi has gone public with  bribery allegations against Gbajabiamila contradictory to  his earlier police statement. He claims the Chief of Staff received roughly 400 million Naira through a proxy, with 200 million Naira still outstanding, and had demanded 48% of the council’s 27.4 billion Naira take off grant, a demand he says he refused. The presidency has also dismissed this as the invention of a serial fraudster, citing his 2016 claim to be an ambassador for a fictitious UN-affiliated youth organisation, which the UN eventually denied. That inconsistency is real. But the presidency’s statement via Bayo Onanuga, President Tinubu’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, does not address the bribery claim on its merits. It denies, restates the timeline, and asks the public to wait for a trial that has not yet begun.

It is also not the first time Gbajabiamila’s name has been attached to an unproven financial allegation. Retired Major General Barry Ndiomu, the former Presidential Amnesty Programme administrator who was eased out of the post despite reportedly wanting to stay, has been the subject of unsubstantiated claims circulating in Nigerian political circles alleging that he paid Gbajabiamila roughly four billion Naira to keep his job, yet still lost it anyway. Nothing has been confirmed in any court filing, and it should be read with the same caution as Adeyemi’s own claims. Combined with a 2021 allegation that Gbajabiamila took cash to help pass petroleum legislation as Speaker, it adds to a pattern of unresolved financial claims trailing the same office.

Adeyemi has since gone into hiding. He told Premium Times the government’s actions were a defence mechanism to silence him, declined to produce any appointment letter, and said his life was under threat.

Public reaction has focused overwhelmingly on Gbajabiamila’s office. Online, the recurring questions have bordered around  who inserted the 1.3 billion Naira or 27.4 billion Naira line into the 2026 budget, whether Gbajabiamila personally received the alleged 400 million Naira, and why the presidency’s rebuttal was so detailed on the forgery and so thin on the bribery claim. Many have noted that no single fraudster acting alone could plausibly assemble a Central Bank account, hundreds of approved staff, National Assembly recognition, a police orderly, EFCC engagement and Head of Service recognition without cooperation or negligence from people well above an impostor with a forged letter.

The presidency’s own account is detailed about Adeyemi’s alleged conduct and considerably thinner on how a supposedly non-existent council embedded itself so deeply. Several named officials have specific, unanswered questions to face. Babangida Hussaini, Director General of the Budget Office, has not produced the submission trail for budget code 0111062001 or explained when it entered the process. Whoever headed the Office of the Head of Service when roughly 314 staff positions were approved in August 2025, reportedly Folasade Yemi-Esan at the time, has not explained what documentation was reviewed before a hiring freeze was waived for an agency the government now calls fictitious. Oluwatoyin Madein, the Accountant General, who runs the office the presidency’s own statement says was misled into facilitating the council’s CBN account, a process that is supposed to require sign off from the SGF, the Chief of Staff and the Finance Ministry,  has not explained how that chain was bypassed or completed.

The CBN Governor Yemi Cardoso has also not explained how the bank’s internal verification unit was fooled. Both chambers of the National Assembly, under Senate Appropriations Committee chair Senator Barau Jibrin and House Speaker Tajudeen Abbas, reviewed the appropriation line by line and have not identified who tabled or approved the entry, reportedly including roughly 182.5 million Naira for World Investment Summit logistics. George Akume, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, whose office is meant to be the custodian of the official register of legitimate agencies and a required sign off in the CBN chain, has not explained what his office did after the Foreign Ministry’s October query. Former Foreign Affairs Minister Yusuf Tuggar’s ministry, whose own ambassador flagged Adeyemi’s meeting with envoys, has not said when or why a US visa request for council staff was rejected, or how the meeting with the ambassador happened without the ministry’s knowledge in the first place.

Opposition figures have asked similar questions. Solomon Dalung has asked whether Tanimola’s death was ever properly investigated before being filed away as accidental. Atiku Abubakar has called for an independent, National Assembly-led probe, arguing the legislature itself failed its basic oversight duty. Femi Falana has pointed out that a presidential statement declaring the Chief of Staff innocent is not the same as an independent investigation.

A private citizen walking through nearly every institutional checkpoint the federal government maintains: the Foreign Ministry, the Office of the Head of Service, the Budget Office, both chambers of the National Assembly, the Accountant General’s office, and the Central Bank of Nigeria is unbelievable for lack of a better word. These are not minor clerical outposts; they are layered, redundant checks meant to make impersonating the state extraordinarily difficult. The system either did not check carefully enough, could not check at all, or, in the more troubling possibility raised by Adeyemi’s counter allegations, someone inside it colluded.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: in 1997, a fraud ring reportedly set up a fake central bank office across from the real CBN headquarters, an operation later called the CBN Annex, using corrupt insiders to handle genuine sensitive documents and convincing foreign victims they were dealing with the real institution before some of those involved were arrested and others fled abroad.

Nigeria’s most sensitive institutions have long been vulnerable to elaborate impersonation, nonchalance, and a lack of transparency. The long running scandal of ghost workers drawing salaries for years before any payroll audit catches them is all part of the rot of our governance systems. The Buhari administration was found to have approved an appointment of Tobias Chukwuemeka Okwuru in 2020. The problem was that he had died before the appointment.

What makes this case outrageous is the number of independent institutions that would have had to fail, or look away, for the scheme to reach this scale. A forged letter that  produces a government website, an office inside the Federal Secretariat, a nine figure budget line passed by the legislature, a staffing waiver, diplomatic engagements with sitting ambassadors and a Central Bank account is a story about an entire verification architecture that does not work across agencies and does not prioritise due diligence.

In a telephone interview live on Seun Okin’s daily programme on Channels TV, Politics Today, Adeyemi insisted that the Chief of Staff, Gbajabiamila, was aware of his appointment and confirmed it. He confirmed that he possessed a genuine letter of appointment but declined to produce it, citing legal advice. He rejected the con artist label, arguing that no one could operate publicly for nearly three years, meeting heads of ministries and agencies nationwide, if the underlying agency did not exist, and framed the government’s disclaimers as an attempt to silence him after he refused financial demands. When asked if he considered himself a criminal, he said no, and left the rest to the court.

Adeyemi might be convicted or exonerated, but the question is: who helped him with this huge scam? There is no way he did it alone.