PFIPC Saga Continues: The Senate Doesn’t Want Answers 

Barely a day after insisting it bore no responsibility for the ₦1.3 billion appropriated to the so-called Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), the Nigerian Senate has now voted against investigating how that allocation found its way into the 2026 budget.

Instead, lawmakers have decided to wait for the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), following President Bola Tinubu’s directive to investigate the matter.

It is a remarkable position for the country’s highest lawmaking body to take.

The Senate’s constitutional role is not simply to approve budgets and move on. Appropriation is oversight. Every budget line debated, amended and eventually passed by the National Assembly carries Parliament’s institutional imprimatur. If a supposedly non-existent agency successfully secured ₦1.3 billion in public funds, asking how that happened is not optional. It is precisely the kind of question the legislature exists to answer.

Instead, the Senate has chosen to outsource that responsibility to the executive.

That decision is especially striking because the controversy is no longer centred on Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi, the man accused of impersonating the Director-General of the agency. Whether Adeyemi is eventually convicted or exonerated is a matter for the courts. The larger scandal is institutional.

How did an agency the Presidency now insists never existed acquire an office inside the Federal Secretariat, a government website, interactions with foreign diplomats, requests for visa facilitation through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and, most astonishingly, a budgetary allocation approved by the National Assembly?

These are questions the state must answer.

Over the past week, government officials have worked hard to distance themselves from responsibility: the Presidency has blamed an alleged fraudster, the Budget Office has remained silent, the Office of the Head of Service has unanswered questions, the Central Bank has offered no explanation, the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation has yet to account for its role, and the National Assembly, for its part, has argued that it merely approved what was placed before it.

Now it has decided not to ask how it got there in the first place. The saga is thick with irony.

Just a day earlier, Senate spokesperson Yemi Adaramodu argued that lawmakers could not be expected to conduct security checks on heads of government agencies. Fair enough. Parliament is not an intelligence agency.

But nobody is asking senators to become detectives; they are being asked to explain how an entity the government now describes as fictitious survived the country’s appropriation process and emerged with ₦1.3 billion in taxpayer funds attached to its name.

To his credit, Senator Kawu Sumaila recognized it as that this is a legislative issue. In sponsoring the motion, he warned that allowing a non-existent agency to appear in the national budget undermines public confidence in the appropriation process and damages the credibility of the National Assembly itself. More importantly, he acknowledged the obvious: Parliament cannot meaningfully separate itself from a budget it ultimately approved.

His colleagues disagreed. Their justification was that the Presidency has already instructed the ICPC to investigate. That reasoning should trouble anyone who understands the concept of separation of powers.

The ICPC investigates criminal conduct, while the Senate investigates matters of public administration, legislative oversight and accountability. These are not competing functions; they are complementary ones. Waiting for an executive agency to determine whether Parliament should scrutinize its own processes effectively reduces legislative oversight to something exercised only when the executive permits it.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of the decision is that the House of Representatives has already adopted a motion to investigate the same allocation. The National Assembly now finds itself in the unusual position of one chamber recognising a need for institutional introspection while the other declines it altogether.

That contrast raises uncomfortable questions. If Parliament refuses to examine failures that occurred within the appropriation process itself, what exactly qualifies as a matter worthy of legislative investigation?

Even if every allegation against Prince Adeyemi were accepted as true, it still requires an extraordinary chain of institutional failures for a private citizen to operate under the banner of a federal agency, obtain government facilities, appear in the national budget and move through multiple layers of bureaucracy before anyone meaningfully intervened.

The more institutions that decline to ask difficult questions, the less convincing the explanation that this was simply the work of one exceptionally audacious fraudster.

The Senate had an opportunity to demonstrate that parliamentary oversight extends beyond approving budgets to interrogating how those budgets are assembled. Instead, it chose to wait for someone else to do the asking.

The unanswered questions remain exactly where they were yesterday. If anything, there is now one more to add.

Not just how a fake agency made it into the budget—but why the Senate no longer seems interested in getting to the bottom of it.