PFIPC: When a Ghost Walks Through Every Checkpoint

One man, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, allegedly created an organisation called the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), appointed himself Director-General, secured office space at the Federal Secretariat in Abuja, opened a Treasury Single Account with the Central Bank of Nigeria in its name, hosted foreign ambassadors, attended official government events, and met with senior ministers and diplomats. The Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation reportedly granted a recruitment waiver for 300 staff members for the agency in 2025. When the Presidency finally moved against him, its spokesman Bayo Onanuga dismissed him as a “criminal impostor” and insisted the organisation never officially existed. Then came the question that has swallowed every other narrative: if the agency was fictitious, how did it appear in the 2026 Appropriation Act with an allocation exceeding N1.3 billion for personnel, overheads and capital expenditure? And how does a fictitious organisation recruit 300 civil servants through the official machinery of the Head of the Civil Service?

Those questions do not have comfortable answers. And Nigeria deserves them.

BudgIT’s review of the 2023, 2024 and 2025 Appropriation Acts showed that neither PFIPC nor its alternate name, the Presidential Economic Advisory Council, appeared as a budgeted entity under the Presidency in any of those years. The agency materialised, apparently from nothing, in the 2026 budget. It then passed through every institutional checkpoint that Nigeria’s fiscal architecture has spent decades constructing: the Budget Office of the Federation, the Federal Executive Council, multiple National Assembly committees, and the desk of the President himself before it was signed into law. The PFIPC’s N1.3 billion allocation survived every single one of those checkpoints. This is not the story of one clever fraudster. This is the story of a system that waved him through.

The Presidency’s official position is coherent as far as it goes. Adeyemi allegedly forged documents, impersonated government, and faces an eight-count criminal charge for forgery and impersonation. His trial at the Federal High Court in Abuja begins on July 27, 2026. The courts will have their say. We do not prejudge the outcome of those proceedings. But the criminal case against one man cannot be allowed to eclipse the institutional questions that his alleged activities have exposed. Adeyemi has alleged that he paid N400 million to the Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, through an intermediary, to secure his appointment, and that Gbajabiamila subsequently demanded an additional N200 million as well as 48 percent of the agency’s proposed N27.4 billion take-off grant. Gbajabiamila has consistently denied any involvement. These allegations have not been proven in court. But they have also not been independently investigated. And in a country where corruption allegations of this magnitude are routinely filed and forgotten, the absence of an independent inquiry is itself a governance failure.

As analyst Walter Ononuju Nnadi has correctly framed it: “If the agency was fictitious, who prepared the budget estimates bearing its name? Which ministry submitted them? Which officials defended those estimates before the National Assembly? Which committees scrutinised them? Which lawmakers approved them? Who inserted the allocation into the appropriation bill? And ultimately, who signed that budget into law?” These are not political questions. They are accounting questions. Accounting questions have answers that can be found, if the will to look for them exists.

Sam Amadi, former chairman of the Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission, was direct: for a budgetary provision to exist for an organisation that the government says does not exist, there must be a fraudulent insider in the Presidency, pointing to a case of compromise and massive illegality. We find it difficult to disagree. A ghost does not write its own budget line. Somebody with access, authority, and institutional knowledge inserted this allocation. Somebody in the Budget Office received the submission. Somebody in the National Assembly’s appropriations committees looked at it, or did not look at it, and passed it anyway. And somebody in the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation signed a recruitment waiver authorising 300 staff for this same ghost. The PFIPC scandal is not, at its core, a story about one audacious impostor. It is a story about how many doors in Nigeria’s public financial architecture have no real locks on them.

BudgIT has recalled that its report on National Assembly insertions into the 2025 budget uncovered 11,122 projects worth N6.93 trillion allegedly inserted without adequate justification, representing about 12.5 percent of the N54.99 trillion federal budget. PFIPC did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged from a budgeting culture in which unexplained insertions are routine, legislative scrutiny is performative, and the assumption that someone else is watching has replaced the reality of anyone actually doing so. The scandal has also drawn condemnation from former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, the Nigeria Democratic Congress, Afenifere, and CISLAC, all of whom have demanded that the government cannot investigate itself on this matter. They are right.

We acknowledge what the Tinubu administration has done right. The Chief of Staff moved to alert the DSS and police when the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission first raised concerns in October 2025. The Presidency has not tried to bury this story. The prosecution is proceeding. These are not nothing. But they are not sufficient. The criminal investigation into Adeyemi cannot become a substitute for investigating how PFIPC entered the budget in the first place. Those are two separate accountability questions requiring two separate investigations. Convicting the man who walked through the open door does not explain why the door was open.

We therefore make the following specific demands. First, President Tinubu must immediately constitute an independent panel, distinct from the criminal prosecution, to investigate the full budgetary journey of PFIPC from submission to enactment, the recruitment waiver granted by the Head of Civil Service for 300 staff, the opening of a Treasury Single Account at the CBN for a body the Presidency now disowns, and the allegations of financial inducement made against the Chief of Staff. The findings must be made public without redaction. Second, the National Assembly must summon the relevant appropriations committee chairs to account publicly for how an allocation of N1,302,978,784 passed scrutiny for an agency none of them could independently verify existed. If Nigeria’s legislators waved through N1.3 billion for a ghost, the oversight function of the National Assembly has failed in a manner that demands institutional remedy. Third, the EFCC and the ICPC must trace every naira of the N1.3 billion allocation and establish conclusively whether any funds were disbursed and to whom. Fourth, the Budget Office must implement a mandatory statutory verification protocol requiring independent legal confirmation of the existence of any agency before it may receive a budget line. A ghost should not be able to pass the first checkpoint, let alone the last.

The N1.3 billion allocated to a non-existent agency could have funded primary healthcare centres, maternal health programmes, classrooms, or rural infrastructure that directly affects millions of Nigerians. While mothers in Kogi and Kebbi deliver babies on bare hospital floors, while public school pupils study under trees for want of classrooms, N1.3 billion found its way to a ghost. The scandal is not only that the fraud happened. The scandal is how easy it apparently was.

A government serious about the anti-corruption war it routinely announces cannot investigate only the man who walked through the open door. It must answer for who left it open, who was supposed to be watching, and what it now intends to do so that the next ghost cannot simply walk through again. July 27 may bring a court verdict on one man. Nigeria needs a reckoning on the system that made him possible.