How a fake presidential council ended up with a budget of almost $1m in Nigeria
To do what the PFIPC did, an agency in Nigeria must pass through some of the most powerful offices in government - the secretary to
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 BriefWire