40 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleChiamaka DikeBBC Africa, Lagos
Instagram / @princeadeyemi_adeniyiHow did an organisation with government offices, civil servants and a line in Nigeria’s national budget turn out to have no legal basis for existing?
For much of 2025, nothing set the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) apart from the many other agencies that make up Nigeria’s federal bureaucracy.
It presented itself as a body created to attract foreign investment into Africa’s most populous country, operating from an office inside the Federal Secretariat in Abuja – the huge complex that houses Nigeria’s government ministries.
Career civil servants were assigned there and ran a website on the government’s official “.gov.ng” domain. It even won approval to hire more than 300 staff, at a time when the government had frozen public-sector recruitment. The website has been taken down but its Instagram account is still working.
Its director general, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, met cabinet ministers, financial regulators, the head of Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency and foreign diplomats. When the 2026 national budget was signed into law, the council was in it, with an allocation of 1.3bn naira ($950,000; £700,000).
Then, last month, the government said it was all a fiction.
The presidency announced that the PFIPC had never been created by law, by presidential order nor by any other official instrument.
Its apparent legitimacy, officials said, rested on a single forged document – an appointment letter claiming that President Bola Tinubu had made Adeyemi the council’s director general. Investigators say the letter carried the forged signature of Femi Gbajabiamila, the president’s chief of staff and most senior aide.
Adeyemi denies this.
He insists the council was lawfully set up in 2024 and that he was properly appointed. He has also accused senior officials of demanding bribes to secure his job and later trying to seize the council’s funds. The presidency denies his claims.
Although he has gone into hiding saying he fears for his life, he has said he will appear in court later this month to answer charges including forgery and impersonation. Police have launched a manhunt for him.
But the scandal has already grown beyond the question of one forged letter.
Investigators are now examining how far the machinery of the Nigerian state moved on Adeyemi’s behalf – and who inside it allowed that to happen.
To do what the PFIPC did, an agency in Nigeria must pass through some of the most powerful offices in government – the secretary to the government of the federation – effectively the government’s chief administrator, the head of the civil service, the accountant-general who controls public accounts, the budget office, and finally parliament, which must pass the spending into law.
Babachir Lawal has sat at the top of that chain.
He served as secretary to the government of the federation, the office that assigns agencies their space and status, under Tinubu’s predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari.
“There’s no way [that office] in a normal system would not know that the agency is fake,” he told the BBC. “You cannot create a budget code for yourself without the budget office knowing. There must be connivance with officials within.”
His conclusion was blunt: “You must have officials within the system who will validate your corrupt behaviour.”
Oluseun Onigbinde reaches a similar view by a different route.
He co-founded BudgIT, a Nigerian transparency group that first drew attention to the council’s funding. He points out that the PFIPC does not appear in the budgets for 2023, 2024 or 2025 but then surfaces – fully formed and with its own budget code – in 2026.
“This agency actually emanated and found itself in the budget from the executive,” he said – meaning it came from within the president’s own side of government, not from parliament. “The functional head of the agency cannot just do that alone. It has to come from the State House [the president’s office],” he told the BBC.
Onigbinde listed the checks a genuine agency must go through – an office in the federal secretariat, sign-off from the civil service, a budget code, and a multi-step approval to open a bank account. He said the “lone impostor” explanation did not add up.
“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 it 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 first said Adeyemi had “fraudulently opened” an account at the Central Bank of Nigeria. The accountant-general’s office later said no such account was ever activated, and that no public money was released.
The distinction matters.
Even if no money left the treasury, the affair has shown how easily the appearance of a real government institution can be created in Nigeria – a country actively courting foreign investors, whom this council was ostensibly set up to attract.
The BBC asked the presidency how the agency obtained its office, staff and budget line, and why it favours an internal investigation over an independent one. The presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
Lawyers for Gbajabiamila said his position was set out in a legal letter and that he was not giving interviews. In that letter, seen by the BBC, they describe Adeyemi’s allegations as false and defamatory, say the two men have never met, and demand he issue a retraction or otherwise face criminal and civil proceedings, including a claim for 10bn naira in damages.
President Tinubu has ordered the country’s anti-corruption commission to investigate and report within 30 days, including on “the role of any public officer” who may have helped. Critics note that he did so while publicly declaring “100% confidence” in Gbajabiamila, who is listed as a witness at Adeyemi’s legal case. Opposition parties, senior lawyers and campaigners are demanding an independent judicial inquiry instead.
Nigeria is no stranger to large-scale corruption but previous scandals have tended to share a common ending: many names mentioned, few convictions.
Tinubu took office in 2023 promising reform, and points to more than 7,000 convictions and over 500bn naira recovered in two years. Critics say those numbers are dominated by low-level internet fraudsters, while politically connected figures are rarely touched.
What sets the PFIPC apart is not the amount of money, which is modest by the standards of some previous scandals, but the method. This was not money skimmed from a contract. It was, allegedly, an entire arm of government created from nothing.
Onigbinde describes it as “a symptom of the dysfunctional budgeting process”. He links it to the rapid growth in the number of government bodies: a 2012 official review recommended cutting Nigeria’s agencies, but their number has instead roughly doubled, to well over 1,200.
“It’s a costly waste of public resource,” he said – in a country heavily in debt. As the investigation widened, its sharpest effect was felt far from Abuja. Police searching for Adeyemi, who had gone into hiding, went instead to his family home in Ogbomoso in the south-western Oyo state, and detained his elderly father, Chief Adetunji Adeniyi.
BBC News YorubaSpeaking to BBC News Yoruba, Chief Adeniyi described officers forcing their way in. “They tore off all the barbed wire and broke the fence and the door,” he said. They searched the house, took the family’s phones, and returned the next morning, he added. “I was so worried. I was just saying: ‘What is this? Are they trying to kill me?’”
He defended his son. “My son is an easy-going person, not a troublemaker,” he said. “I am very sad at all the reports that I am hearing. I am really confused by it all.”
Adeyemi’s lawyer, prominent human rights advocate Femi Falana, told the BBC that Adeniyi had since been released, and that detaining a relative in place of a suspect was illegal in Nigeria. Police spokesperson Anietie Okokon Edem Iniedu said the elderly man had not been arrested but was invited to assist with their inquiries.
Falana, who would not discuss the case itself, said Adeyemi had assured him he would appear for his trial, though Falana did not know where his client was. He echoed the wider demand for those higher up to be examined.
“This guy should not just be sacrificed alone,” he said. “Those who used him to achieve their own objectives will have to be exposed.”
The BBC has asked the body in charge of the investigation – the ICPC – for comment, but has yet to receive a reply at the time of publication.
Adeyemi is due to appear in court in Abuja on 27 July, with Gbajabiamila and 10 others listed as prosecution witnesses. The anti-corruption commission’s report is expected soon after.
Both will be measured against the same question: whether they identify the officials who allowed a phantom agency to acquire offices, staff and public money – or whether the affair comes to rest on one man, still in hiding, and still insisting that the council he led was real.
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