Nigeria's phantom agency: How a fake council infiltrated the budget

In the middle of 2025, a government council began operating from inside Nigeria's Federal Secretariat in Abuja, the sprawling complex that houses the nation's ministries. The Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council presented itself as an agency designed to attract foreign investment into Africa's most populous country. It had an office. It had civil servants assigned to it. It maintained a website on the government's official domain. When the 2026 national budget passed into law, the council was there, with an allocation of 1.3 billion naira—roughly $950,000.

Then, in June, the presidency announced that none of it was real.

The council had never been created by law, by presidential order, or by any official mechanism. Its only claim to legitimacy was a single forged document: an appointment letter purporting to show that President Bola Tinubu had named Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew as the council's director general. The signature belonged to Femi Gbajabiamila, the president's chief of staff. Investigators say it was fake. Adeyemi denies the forgery. He insists the council was lawfully established in 2024 and that he was properly appointed. He has also alleged that senior officials demanded bribes to secure his position and later attempted to seize the council's funds—claims the presidency rejects. Despite going into hiding and saying he fears for his life, Adeyemi has indicated he will appear in court this month to face charges including forgery and impersonation. Police are searching for him.

But the scandal has expanded far beyond the question of a single forged letter. Investigators are now examining how the machinery of the Nigerian state moved on Adeyemi's behalf, and crucially, who inside that machinery allowed it to happen. To establish itself as a legitimate agency, an organization in Nigeria must navigate some of the government's most powerful offices: the secretary to the government of the federation, who effectively serves as the state's chief administrator; the head of the civil service; the accountant-general, who controls public accounts; the budget office; and finally parliament, which must approve any spending. Babachir Lawal, who held the secretary's position under President Muhammadu Buhari, told the BBC that such an outcome would be impossible without internal complicity. "There must be connivance with officials within," he said. "You cannot create a budget code for yourself without the budget office knowing."

Oluseun Onigbinde, who co-founded BudgIT, a Nigerian transparency organization that first exposed the council's funding, reached the same conclusion through different evidence. The PFIPC did not appear in the budgets for 2023, 2024, or 2025. Then it surfaced in 2026, fully formed and with its own budget code. "This agency actually emanated and found itself in the budget from the executive," Onigbinde told the BBC, meaning it originated from the president's own office, not from parliament. He outlined the checkpoints a genuine agency must clear: securing an office in the federal secretariat, obtaining sign-off from the civil service, acquiring a budget code, and navigating a multi-step approval process to open a bank account. "I don't know how you go through all these tracks and you still come out at the end and this agency is fake," he said. "He does have backing. The government just has to be honest about who exactly are the people involved."

The government's own account has shifted. Its spokesman initially said Adeyemi had "fraudulently opened" an account at the Central Bank of Nigeria. The accountant-general's office later stated that no such account was ever activated and that no public money was released. The distinction matters, though it does not resolve the larger question: how easily the appearance of a real government institution can be constructed in Nigeria, a country actively seeking foreign investors whom this council was ostensibly created to attract.

The presidency has ordered the anti-corruption commission to investigate and report within 30 days, including on "the role of any public officer" who may have assisted. But critics note that President Tinubu made this announcement while publicly declaring "100% confidence" in Gbajabiamila, who is listed as a witness in Adeyemi's case. Opposition parties, senior lawyers, and anti-corruption campaigners are demanding an independent judicial inquiry instead. Gbajabiamila's lawyers have denied Adeyemi's allegations as false and defamatory, claiming the two men have never met, and have demanded a retraction or threatened criminal and civil proceedings, including a claim for 10 billion naira in damages.

What distinguishes this scandal is not the sum of money involved—modest by the standards of previous Nigerian corruption cases—but the method. This was not money diverted from a contract. It was, allegedly, an entire government agency fabricated from nothing. Onigbinde describes it as "a symptom of the dysfunctional budgeting process," linked to the rapid proliferation of government bodies. A 2012 official review recommended reducing Nigeria's agencies, yet their number has roughly doubled to well over 1,200. As the investigation widened, its human toll became visible far from the capital. Police searching for Adeyemi went to his family home in Ogbomoso in southwestern Oyo state and detained his elderly father, Chief Adetunji Adeniyi, without an arrest warrant. The officers forced their way in, tore off barbed wire, broke the fence and door, searched the house, and took the family's phones. Chief Adeniyi was later released. His son's lawyer, prominent human rights advocate Femi Falana, noted that detaining a relative in place of a suspect is illegal in Nigeria. The central question remains unanswered: whether the investigation will identify the officials who enabled a phantom agency to acquire offices, staff, and public money, or whether the affair will come to rest on one man, still in hiding, still insisting that the council he led was real.