The Committee for the Defence of Human Rights called on Chief of Staff to the President Femi Gbajabiamila to step aside pending an independent investigation into his alleged role in a scandal involving the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, a body that the federal government itself acknowledged did not officially exist but which had been allocated N1.3 billion in the 2026 federal budget.
CDHR National President Kehinde Taiga said in a statement on Sunday that the scale of the controversy demanded that the Chief of Staff temporarily vacate his position while an independent probe was conducted to determine the full facts of the matter. The group said allowing Gbajabiamila to continue in office while questions swirled about his connection to the scandal undermined public confidence in the Presidency.
PFIPC Scandal Deepens
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A man identified as Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew had paraded himself as the Director-General of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council and had allegedly used forged government documents to open a CBN account. The Presidency later denied the existence of the PFIPC and dismissed Matthew’s claims, saying he was a fraudster who had fabricated his role. However, critics noted that the N1.3 billion budget line for the agency appeared in the official 2026 appropriations document, raising questions about how it got there.
SERAP separately demanded that Senate President Akpabio and Speaker Abbas explain the N1.3 billion allocation to what it called a fictitious presidential council, threatening legal action if a satisfactory explanation was not provided. BudgIT also called for a probe into the budget line, saying its presence in the appropriations document regardless of whether the agency existed represented a serious failure of budget process integrity.
Opposition Uses Scandal in IMF Row
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Furthermore, Atiku Abubakar directly linked the PFIPC ghost agency to the broader N8.8 trillion off-budget spending controversy, saying both were expressions of the same governing philosophy. He described them as a ghost agency and a shadow budget, two symptoms of a government that treated public money as its private reserve. Consequently, the PFIPC scandal has evolved from a minor budget anomaly into a major governance credibility issue for the Tinubu administration heading into 2027.
