A Ghost Agency Needed Real Accomplices; Nigeria Has Only Prosecuted The Ghost, By Nnamdi Prince | Sahara Reporters
That is the part of this story that keeps getting quietly filed away while the investigation trains its lens on Adeyemi alone.
There is a peculiar comfort that Nigerian power structures take in finding a single villain. It happened with the fake arms contracts of the Dasuki years, and it is happening again with the extraordinary case of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, a government agency that did not exist, run from an office inside the seat of the presidency, that came within reach of nearly a billion naira in public funds before anyone in authority appears to have asked the most basic question: does this thing actually exist?
The official story, as it has been told to Nigerians so far, is reassuringly simple. A man named Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew invented an agency, forged a letter of appointment, occupied office space inside the Federal Secretariat, opened accounts with the Central Bank, and nearly walked away with public money. He is now the subject of a criminal case and a police manhunt, accused of forgery and impersonation. The presidency has called him a con artist. Case, apparently, closed.
Except it isn’t, and shouldn’t be. Because the document at the centre of this affair was not just any letter. It was a letter purportedly bearing the signature of Femi Gbajabiamila, the president’s chief of staff, arguably the second most powerful office in the Nigerian state. Adeyemi has publicly said he was given that appointment by Gbajabiamila’s office. Gbajabiamilasays he has never met the man. Somewhere between those two claims sits a scandal that is not really about a con artist at all. It is about how a fabricated document, if that is indeed what it was, moved through the machinery of Nigeria’s presidency with enough apparent authority to secure office space, bank accounts and a budget line, without a single senior official stopping to check it.
That is the part of this story that keeps getting quietly filed away while the investigation trains its lens on Adeyemi alone.
Consider the shape the official inquiries have taken. The House of Representatives probe, convened with much fanfare, produced little beyond theatre, legislators posturing for cameras, officials reading prepared statements, and no serious effort to interrogate why a body with no legal existence made it into a national budget in the first place, a question even the presidency’s own allies have struggled to answer. The ICPC’s interim findings, welcome as they are for uncovering two further fictitious agencies allegedly linked to Adeyemi, have so far followed the same architecture: forensic energy spent tracing Adeyemi’s paper trail, and comparatively little public accounting of which officials signed off on office allocations, which bank compliance officers waived their own due diligence, and who in the chief of staff’s office allowed a letter bearing his name to circulate unchallenged for as long as it apparently did.
None of this is proof, on its own, that Gbajabiamila or anyone around him orchestrated a cover-up. It would be irresponsible to claim certainty either way, and Gbajabiamila is entitled to have his denial taken seriously until evidence says otherwise. But the pattern is hard to ignore, and Nigerians have seen it before: an investigation that widens just enough to catch the powerless, and narrows just in time to spare the powerful. Civil society groups and senior lawyers have already called for a fully independent inquiry, precisely because the current arrangement asks the public to trust that the people whose office produced the disputed letter will also be the ones who decide how seriously to investigate it.
If Adeyemi is the fraud the presidency says he is, he should face the courts and answer for it. But treating him as the whole story lets everyone else in this affair off far too lightly. A fake government agency does not get office space inside the Federal Secretariat, staff seconded from the Accountant-General’s office, and a line in the national budget by forging one signature and fooling no one else. Somewhere along that chain, real officials made real decisions, to allocate space, to accept documents at face value, to fund a budget line for a council nobody had heard of. Naming Adeyemi as the sole author of this scheme does not answer for those decisions. It simply spares the people who made them from having to.
Nigeria has watched this script before: a scandal breaks, a scapegoat is produced, an inquiry is convened with great solemnity, and the institution at the centre of it all emerges intact. The tragedy is not that Nigerians can see the choreography. It is that they have come to expect it.