That Presidential Council

The Presidency wants Nigerians to believe that one man, acting alone, opened 34 bank accounts, walked into an office at the Federal Secretariat, met foreign ambassadors at a hotel in Asokoro, and got a budget line worth ₦1.3 billion inserted into the national appropriation, all in the name of an agency that, according to the government itself, has never existed. We are not buying it, and neither should anyone paying attention.

Now that President Ahmed Bola Tinubu has delved into the matter, we hope that the panelbeaters wil back off and let truth be unraveled

Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew is accused of forging appointment letters purportedly issued by the Chief of Staff to the President, Femi Gbajabiamila, and using them to present himself as director-general of a Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, an agency the Presidency insists is fictitious. The Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, says the scheme first came to light after officials of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission complained that another body appeared to be duplicating their functions.

Gbajabiamila petitioned the police and the Department of State Services on October 17 last year, and Adeyemi was arrested ten days later at the very Federal Secretariat office he had apparently been running his operation from. Investigators say he was operating nine bank accounts under fictitious government-sounding names, among them the FCT Investment Promotion Agency and something called FIPA-APP, and had used forged documents to open an account at the Central Bank of Nigeria itself.

None of this is a small-time con. A man does not wander into the Federal Secretariat, secure office space in Phase III, Abuja, and start holding meetings with ambassadors and Nigerian officials without somebody, somewhere, signing off on the arrangement. He does not open a CBN account by accident. And a budget line for a council that supposedly never existed does not write itself into the 2026 Appropriation Act. Someone in the Office of the Head of Service, the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, or the budget office prepared those estimates, defended them before the National Assembly, and watched them get approved.

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar asked the obvious question when he demanded to know “who prepared the budget estimates bearing its name” and “which committees scrutinised them.” Those are not partisan talking points. They are the questions any government interested in its own credibility should be racing to answer, not sidestepping.

There is also the matter of Dolapo Babatunde Tanimola, the man Adeyemi told investigators had helped him procure the forged appointment letter. Police went looking for Tanimola only to discover he had died in a fire at a hotel in Abuja on October 22, five days before Adeyemi’s arrest. We are not in the business of manufacturing conspiracy where none exists, but a convenient death, at a convenient time, involving the one person who could corroborate or contradict Adeyemi’s account, is not a detail any serious investigation can afford to wave off.

The Presidency’s own account raises further questions it has not fully addressed. The Foreign Affairs Ministry only grew alarmed after Adeyemi met ambassadors at a hotel in Asokoro without the ministry’s knowledge, and it took a chain of letters between the ministry, the National Security Adviser’s office and the Secretary to the Government of the Federation before anyone got a straight answer. That an impostor could hold himself out to foreign missions for weeks, soliciting a note verbale from the Foreign Affairs Ministry to help his associates obtain American visas, without triggering an earlier alarm, says something uncomfortable about how thin the checks around the Presidency’s name have become.

We have said before on this page that Nigeria’s recurring scandals share a common thread: the country is rarely short of policy or law to prevent them, but it is chronically short of officials willing to enforce either. This case fits that pattern precisely. Adeyemi is not new to fraudulent self-invention. Back in 2016, he presented himself as an ambassador and president-general of something called the World Youth Organisation, claiming affiliation with the United Nations, until the UN itself denied any such body existed. That a man with that history could, years later, walk into a federal ministry’s premises and set up shop under a fake council’s letterhead is an indictment of the institutional memory, or the lack of it, inside government agencies meant to guard against exactly this sort of impersonation.

The Presidency is right to caution the public against treating Adeyemi’s claims, made while out on bail, as gospel. His allegation that Gbajabiamila personally appointed him contradicts what he reportedly told the police in November, and the matter is now properly before the Federal High Court, with a hearing scheduled for July 27. We agree that the courts, not press statements, should settle whether Adeyemi acted with or without official blessing.

But the criminal trial of Adeyemi will not, on its own, answer the harder question of which offices allowed a fictitious council to draw a budget line, occupy government premises and transact with a central bank account. That inquiry does not need to wait for a verdict against one defendant.

In our view, President Bola Tinubu should order an investigation that runs alongside the court case, one aimed squarely at the officials in the Office of the Head of Service, the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Accountant-General’s office and wherever else in the bureaucracy this scheme found cover.

Adeyemi may well be guilty of every count against him. But a fraud of this size, running for this long, inside government buildings, does not survive on the cunning of one impostor. It survives on the silence of everyone who should have stopped him and didn’t. The President must find those people, and heads must roll, no matter whose ox gets gored.