By Gift ChapiOdekina, Abuja Somewhere inside the Federal Secretariat Complex in Abuja, until only weeks ago, a signpost still pointed visitors toward the office of the ‘Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council.’ The council had a Director-General, a staff of 300, a line in the 2026 Appropriation Act worth N1.3 billion, and, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), two functioning accounts, including one in pounds sterling. The only thing PFIPC did not have, the Presidency now insists, was a right to exist. Nearly ten months after officials first quietly flagged the council as fraudulent, and weeks into a presidential probe, a National Assembly investigation, and a police manhunt, one pattern has hardened faster than any actual answer: Nobody in government will say the failure was theirs.
The agency that wasn’t The scandal centres on Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, who allegedly presented forged documents, including a letter bearing the falsified signature of the President’s Chief of Staff, Mr Femi Gbajabiamila, to establish himself as Director-General of a council the Presidency says was never legally created. Using that paper trail, Adeyemi allegedly secured office space at the Federal Secretariat, opened bank accounts with the CBN, deployed staff, and got PFIPC written into the nation’s budget under code 0111062001, comprising over N1 billion in recurrent costs and N300 million in capital expenditure. President Bola Tinubu has ordered the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to investigate, giving it 30 days to report back.
The House of Representatives has convened its own ad-hoc committee. Police have declared Adeyemi wanted. And, on Monday, July 20, Gbajabiamila himself appeared before ICPC investigators not as a witness alone, but as the man whose office the forged letter claimed to speak for.
The first warning …and the silence that followed What has turned this from a fraud story into an institutional reckoning is the timeline. According to Presidency and civil service sources, the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Office of the Chief of Staff, the Office of the National Security Adviser, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Nigeria Police had all identified problems with Adeyemi’s claims as far back as November 2025. Gbajabiamila wrote to the Inspector-General o…
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