(Published in the Nigerian Tribune on Monday, 6 July, 2026).
President Bola Tinubu’s Villa scriptwriters are supremely gifted. Go back and read Mr. Bayo Onanuga’s So Long a Letter on the Gbajabiamila-Adeyemi ‘feud’ over an agency that is simultaneously legal and illegal. The lengthy statement is a work of prose, daintily littered with repetition and refrain; rhyme and rhythm.
Check out this excerpt: “On 27 October, 2025, Adeyemi was arrested… The police filed an eight-count charge on November 27, 2025… He is due in court on July 27, 2026.”
Read it again: arrest on the 27th. Charge on the 27th. Court slated for the 27th. Is the 27th a code for something? If it is, should we not be curious about what it encrypts—or decrypts? If it is merely a repetition, is it deliberate or accidental?
Adolf Hitler famously praised repetition as a valuable tool of propaganda and said so in the Mein Kampf. Modern psychologists describe a related phenomenon; they call it the Illusory Truth Effect. It fits in here. Repetition can make the bitter sound sweet and give evil a rhythm to which the unwary begin to dance.
Now, let us be more serious.
You accused a man of abducting your government. You arrested him on 27 October 2025. You waited (or wasted) one full month before filing criminal charges against him on 27 November. Then you went to a very deep sleep. Seven months after those charges were filed, you issued an almost one-month notice that the accused would finally appear in court on 27 July, 2026. That sequence raises questions. Guilt hesitates. Forgive me if that is how I read your body language.
Yet, while your left hand was filing criminal charges in November 2025, your right hand was quietly inserting ₦1.3 billion into the 2026 budget for the very agency whose existence formed the basis of the arrest and prosecution.
Hello! What kind of government are you?
From the photographs and videos that I have seen, one impression repeatedly strikes me: calculated deference to power. Whether at public events or in carefully staged photographs with prominent figures, the man’s performance seems designed to project proximity and importance. To my eyes, that is the marker of very dangerous sycophancy.
This man was visible everywhere ‘working’ for your government. You saw and watched him do all sorts of things; you said nothing and did nothing. Now, either you have finally broken free from the spell of this your nemesis or Èṣù has poured palm oil on the matter between you. Suddenly, you tell us that the man is fake and his agency counterfeit and he fires back with withering allegations of graft and bribery of humongous proportions.
Sycophants do the dirty work of the powerful. They fawn over their patrons with the devotion of household pets. But, unlike devoted dogs and cats, their loyalty stretches only as far as their stomachs. That is what makes them dangerous. Today they praise; if you annoy them tomorrow, they betray. Their allegiance is to their appetite, not to you.
Meanwhile, the man you accused of running a criminal parallel government remained virtually untouched. He is free, still free. On Thursday last week, he even spoke by telephone on Seun Okinbaloye’s Politics Today on Channels Television. Apparently, he was not criminal enough for that call to be used to trace and arrest him…
What vocabulary is left for describing a government that behaves like this with a straight face?
I am tempted to further ask: is this government a government…?
Now, because tomorrow will forget what this case is all about, let me restate it here. The Chief of Staff to the President, Mr. Femi Gbajabiamila, issued a disclaimer on one Adeyemi Adeniyi Matthew, accusing him of fraudulently operating the so-called Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), a body the Presidency says never legally existed. Adeyemi responded with a press conference, denying the allegations and producing documents which he said showed official recognition of the agency, including references in the national budget. He capped his rebuttal with sweeping allegations of corruption and bribery against Gbajabiamila.
By the time the man finished his presentation, the government’s image had fallen below three pence.
Now, in the light of this unfolding scandal, let me ask: Has the entire Bola Tinubu government become Iago, the master manipulator, presenting one face to the public while another lurks behind the curtain?
A fictitious council allocated billions in a country’s national budget. What do fake, fictitious and counterfeit really mean? Imagine a masquerade whose identity is counterfeit wrestling in the mud with an enchanting impostor. That is the curious spectacle presented by the PFIPC, its self-acclaimed director-general, and the presidency. In this strange contest, each side accuses the other of unreality. One says the agency is real and founded in 2024; the other says the council never existed but behaved for months as though it did. One denounces being called an impostor; the other cannot explain how the alleged imposture found office space, official dealings and a budgetary allocation. The result is a political theatre in which the audience is left wondering who, exactly, is wearing the mask.
In literary theory, fiction is a world separate from reality, yet modelled after it. Literary scholar, Biodun Jeyifo, famously calls it “the truthful lie.” In today’s Nigeria, that distinction appears to have collapsed. Our fictions wear agbádá, they occupy official offices, hold meetings, seek diplomatic notes, open Central Bank accounts, receive civil servants and even find their way into the national budget.
Nigerians easily get divided. We take sides in every contest no matter how shameful. In this shame, regime people are throwing a lot online to get back their lost face. This agency had existed since Buhari years, some of them said. Enemies of the government fought back. They said that is not true. What existed under Buhari was Presidential Economic Advisory Council. The rat with the current bad odour is called ‘Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council.’ Between both camps stands Nigeria, naked and embarrassed. My professor-friend described it as “a scandal of mega proportions.” She was right.
If the agency is fake, how did it acquire the appearance of government? If it is real, why is the Presidency denying its child? The matter is no longer merely about one man.
Nigeria is a strange, dangerous country. A fetish nation does strange things. Entries on pages 50 and 51 of the 2026 budget have become the shrine before which Nigerians dance in a trance. There, under the Presidency, sits the “Presidential Economic Advisory Council/Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council,” carrying an allocation of over ₦1.3 billion. That entry is either proof of official existence or proof of official criminal crudity. Either way, it indicts the system.
Budgets do not write themselves. They are prepared, scrutinised, defended, passed and signed. Yet no one behind those formidable gates smelt the odious shrew.
I have asked several questions. I have some more: Between the discovery of the alleged fraud in October 2025 and the presentation of the 2026 budget in December 2025, who inserted the agency into the budget? Who defended the allocation before the National Assembly? Who approved it? And who failed to notice it through the executive and legislative stages of the budget process?
Curiosity. How many more of such fictitious agencies and entries do we have in our budgets? When did such egregious infusions start? Is this a confirmation of the allegations that ghost agencies may exist as warehouses of heist? Could this strange incident be the answer to the conundrum of government announcing huge revenue intakes while ministries and agencies cry of fund starvation? Where, then, does the money go? Into phantom agencies as this?
The State House statement paints Adeyemi as a con artist, an impostor who built a palace of forged papers and persuaded government figurines to bow before it. That is serious. But even that defence deepens the shame. Where was the Federal Government with all its security agencies when a fraud was securing office space, getting diplomatic attention, budgetary visibility and banking access? This fraud is not a small fraud. It is a society of concentric frauds.
History has seen fake embassies, fake police stations, fake courts, fake appointments and ghost workers. What is far rarer is a fictitious government agency walking the corridors of the state, occupying official office space, receiving staff posted from the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, operating a Central Bank account and appearing in the national budget.
I won’t be surprised if the whole world is already saying “this Nigerian case belongs in a category of its own.”
There have been bizarre cases elsewhere, even in advanced democracies, but none appears to match the current champion….
In July 2021, the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) reported a lawsuit challenging budgetary allocations by the Federal Government to institutions not established by law. “In the 2021 budget (and others before it) the Federal Government and the National Assembly authorised billions of naira to be spent by bodies unknown to law,” the plaintiff alleged in Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/273/2021.
The suit listed several agencies by their names. One, according to the plaintiff, was “supposed to be defunct, having been replaced” by another agency, yet it still enjoyed “operational” status and continued to receive federal funding. You want to ask what became of that suit? I am also asking.
Disturbing examples above. Even against that troubling background, the current PFIPC scandal stands apart as an almighty. A fake agency is one thing; a phantom agency recognised by the machinery of government is quite another. That is what makes this affair so extraordinary.
And this is where Nigeria becomes more frightening than fiction. In fiction, the reader knows the world is invented. In Nigeria, the invented world acquires flesh and blood. It demands allocation, recognition and respect. A non-existent agency can behave like an existing one because the state itself has become a theatre of documents without discipline. We run a country where office acts more powerful than law, where seals defeat scrutiny, and where the absurd becomes official simply by surviving long enough.
The courts (if there are still real courts) will determine the criminal case. But the larger judgment already belongs to the public. Whether Adeyemi is a lone trickster or merely the visible finger of a hidden hand, this scandal exposes a system that has become dangerously porous. A state that cannot distinguish between its agencies and its apparitions is already in trouble. What we have is government as fictitious reality; it is not comedy. It is institutional collapse in its worst form. And there is nothing funny about that.
So, what next? The presidency says the man will soon have his day in court. The man replies on live television that he looks forward to meeting the state there. Both sides, it seems, are ready for the decisive encounter. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet reminds us, “The readiness is all….”
That is, if this saga of fictitious agencies does not end in a fictitious court.
