N24 Billion for a Ghost: The PFIPC Scandal Is a Verdict on the Nigerian State

A fictitious government agency was allegedly funded, staffed, and housed inside the Presidency for months. That it happened at all is a scandal. That no single institution caught it is the indictment.

A FRAUD THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED ITS FIRST DAY

Strip away the political noise and one fact remains undisputed: a man named Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew is standing trial at the Federal High Court in Abuja on an eight-count charge for allegedly forging a presidential appointment letter, impersonating a government official, and operating thirty-four bank accounts registered to agencies that, by the Presidency’s own admission, do not exist. Among them was the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, a body he claimed to head as Director-General, and which he says was created with the knowledge and cooperation of the Chief of Staff to the President, Femi Gbajabiamila.

The Presidency denies the council was ever a recognised government agency. That denial would be the end of the story, except for one inconvenient detail: the agency’s name reportedly appears on pages 50 and 51 of the 2026 Appropriation Act, alongside a budget line running into the tens of billions of naira. A government cannot simultaneously insist an entity never existed and explain why the National Assembly appropriated public funds to it. One of those two positions is false, and Nigerians are entitled to know which.

INSTITUTIONS THAT SHOULD HAVE STOPPED THIS — AND DIDN’T

This is where the story stops being about one fraudster and starts being about the architecture of the Nigerian state. For a ghost agency to function, it did not merely need a confident conman. It needed the Central Bank of Nigeria to open a Treasury Single Account, a domiciliary account, and a Pounds Sterling account in its name. It needed the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation to process those openings. It needed the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation to approve, by some accounts, over three hundred staff positions. It needed office space inside the Federal Secretariat. It needed a line item to survive scrutiny in the National Assembly’s appropriations process.

None of that happens through the audacity of a single man. It happens through the silence, negligence, or complicity of institutions whose entire mandate is to prevent exactly this. Staff who say they were posted to the council without ever having heard of it before their deployment notice arrived only sharpen the question: if career civil servants can be assigned to an agency that supposedly does not exist, what does ‘due process’ even mean inside Nigeria’s federal bureaucracy?

A government cannot insist an agency never existed and also explain why it was funded. One of those two claims is false — and the public is owed the answer.

THE COUNTER-ALLEGATIONS NOBODY IN GOVERNMENT WANTS TO LITIGATE IN PUBLIC

Adeyemi has not gone quietly. He alleges that his appointment was secured through the Chief of Staff for a sum of six hundred million naira, of which four hundred million was reportedly paid through intermediaries, leaving an outstanding balance of two hundred million. He further alleges that Gbajabiamila demanded forty-eight percent of the agency’s take-off grant — a sum reported at over twenty-seven billion naira — and that his refusal to pay triggered the Presidency’s public disavowal of the council’s existence. He has also claimed multiple attempts on his life, including an alleged attack on the Abuja-Kaduna Expressway, and has linked the October 2025 death of Babatunde Tanimola, described as an intermediary in the arrangement, to the wider affair.

These remain allegations, made by a man facing serious criminal charges and with every incentive to implicate others. They should not be treated as proven fact. But they are specific, documented enough to be investigated, and serious enough that dismissing them without inquiry would itself be a failure of accountability. A death, an alleged assassination attempt, and a named cash figure are not the kind of details a credible government can wave away with a press statement.

WHAT REAL ACCOUNTABILITY WOULD LOOK LIKE

Opposition parties, including the Nigeria Democratic Congress and the African Democratic Congress, have called for Gbajabiamila’s removal pending investigation. A coalition of civil society organisations has asked President Tinubu to direct the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission to investigate. These are reasonable, proportionate demands — not because guilt is established, but because the offices involved cannot credibly investigate themselves.

An independent panel with the authority to compel testimony from officials at the Central Bank, the Accountant-General’s office, the Head of Service, and the National Assembly’s appropriations leadership is not a partisan demand. It is the minimum standard any functioning democracy owes its citizens when a documented sum of public money has been tied to an entity the government itself calls fictitious. Forensic examination of the documents, transparent publication of findings, and protection for witnesses — including Adeyemi, whatever his own culpability — are not favours. They are the baseline cost of restoring any credibility to the process.

WHY THIS BELONGS ON CSR REPORTERS

This platform exists to measure the distance between what institutions claim and what they deliver — corporate or governmental. The PFIPC affair is that gap in its starkest form: a state apparatus that could not tell the difference between a real agency and an imagined one until journalists and opposition parties forced the question into the open. Every corporate board that has ever hidden behind a glossy sustainability report should recognise the pattern. Every regulator that signs off without verification should recognise the risk. Accountability that only activates after exposure is not accountability — it is damage control wearing its clothes.

Nigeria does not need another press statement distancing the Presidency from a scandal it funded, staffed, and housed. It needs an answer to a single, uncomfortable question: how much of the Nigerian state currently runs on the same trust that let a ghost agency draw a budget line for months without challenge? Until that question is answered — publicly, independently, and under oath — every institution named in this affair remains, by its own silence, a suspect in it.

CSR Reporters is Africa’s independent accountability and sustainability intelligence platform. This piece reflects ongoing reporting on a matter still before Nigeria’s courts; all individuals named are entitled to a presumption of innocence pending the outcome of legal proceedings.