How a made-up agency found its way into Nigeria’s budget

{"text":[[{"start":7.1,"text":"The Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council had an important task: to attract foreign investment into Nigeria. It had a line in the federal budget, a sought-after office inside the Federal Secretariat in Abuja, where ministries are housed, and a website on the official government of Nigeria domain. There was only one hitch. It did not officially exist."}],[{"start":29.4,"text":"Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi, who allegedly headed the fake agency, is due to appear in court next month to answer charges of forgery and impersonation, which he denies."}],[{"start":39.22,"text":"He is alleged by the presidency not only to have smuggled his non-existent agency into the federal budget but to have held high-level meetings and events in the president’s name with Nigerian politicians and representatives of foreign governments. Some of those encounters were publicised in slick social media campaigns."}],[{"start":57.32,"text":"“There were online posts and meetings and an office,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an independent political analyst and author of the Bellwether Substack, which explores Nigerian politics and public policy. “At some point the difference between fact and fiction blurs.”"}],[{"start":74.08,"text":"But in Nigeria, many people seem less exercised by Adeyemi’s alleged culpability than by what the bizarre case says about institutional oversight by Nigeria’s lawmakers and the apparently rampant corruption going on under President Bola Tinubu’s nose."}],[{"start":89.08,"text":"Adeyemi’s lawyers, who could not be reached, do not deny that the agency their client headed lacked legal status, but said in a statement this month that Adeyemi could not be “held uniquely responsible for failing to detect what the whole apparatus of the state validated”."}],[{"start":104.04,"text":"Justice could not be served, they wrote, by prosecuting the “mouthpiece while ignoring the state machinery that built, budgeted and bureaucratically birthed the entity”."}],[{"start":114.68,"text":"Several Nigerians from civil society said that either the president’s office knew about the fake agency, in which case it was implicated in the diversion of funds, or it did not, in which case it was incompetent."}],[{"start":125.68,"text":"“It begs the question of how many more are out there,” said Fu’ad Lawal, co-founder of Archivi.ng, which keeps digital records of Nigerian media to help create a more robust public forum."}],[{"start":137.68,"text":"“Ghost workers have been found before, but this is an entire ghost organisation,” Lawal said, referring to previous revelations about workers on the government payroll who receive a salary or pension without actually doing any work. “For me, it’s less about the money and more about the process: how do things get on to the budget in the first place?”"}],[{"start":158.64,"text":"Not only was the fictitious promotion council allowed to operate in plain sight, but the 2026 Appropriation Act awarded it a budget of N1.3bn ($950,000). The fake agency also claimed access to a further N27.3bn in a so-called “take-off grant”, funds allocated to help new bodies get going by renting premises, buying equipment and hiring staff."}],[{"start":182.84,"text":"Atedo Peterside, founder of investment bank Stanbic IBTC, said he doubted whether many members of the national assembly had the skills or the inclination to scrutinise the N68tn (roughly $50bn) 2026 budget, a document that ran to 2,604 pages. The budget, which got several readings in both houses, was signed into law by Tinubu on April 17."}],[{"start":207.28,"text":"“The whole oversight function in terms of the House of Representatives and the Senate has been a joke since this government came in,” Peterside said of the Tinubu administration, which assumed power in 2023."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":218.8,"text":"Chidi Odinkalu, a visiting professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said the unusual part of the fake agency story was that it had been called out, not that it was receiving funds. Rumours have swirled around Abuja that allegations about the agency owed more to a settling of scores than to genuine attempts to expose financial indiscretions."}],[{"start":238.56,"text":"“Anyone who follows the budget process carefully in Nigeria knows there are too many of these agencies that do not appear to exist but that get money routinely,” Odinkalu said. “In every budget cycle, money is allocated to them and it disappears.”"}],[{"start":252.68,"text":"The scandal has pulled in the president’s chief of staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, whom Adeyemi accused of demanding bribes in return for giving him the job as director-general of the fake agency. Adeyemi claimed to have paid Gbajabiamila N400mn for the position but said Gbajabiamila had come back for far more, demanding nearly half of the N27.3bn start-up costs."}],[{"start":277.76,"text":"Gbajabiamila has denied the accusation, saying he lacked the authority to appoint the head of an agency and that signatures on related documents were forged. He has launched a N15bn defamation suit against Adeyemi and demanded a published apology. Gbajabiamila did not respond to a request for comment."}],[{"start":297.36,"text":"After going public with his accusation, Adeyemi went into hiding, saying he feared for his life. Police later tracked him down to Osun state, in south-west Nigeria."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":307.24,"text":"Tinubu, who is gearing up for his re-election campaign ahead of January’s presidential poll, has ordered an inquiry into the fake agency. The president has made a show of going after previously looted funds and said there would be “no safe haven for corruption in Nigeria”."}],[{"start":322.96,"text":"“We are aware of the public interest in a man called [Adeyemi] who has been parading himself as the director-general of a fictitious Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council,” his office said in a statement. “The chief of staff could not have issued a letter of appointment to a non-existent agency.”"}],[{"start":340.32,"text":"Many Nigerians are perplexed as to how things could have gone so far without the government knowing anything about it. The foreign ministry and the Nigerian Investment Promotion Council, a real agency with a set of responsibilities similar to the fake promotion council, sounded the alarm about the activities of the fictitious agency last year."}],[{"start":358.64,"text":"One former NIPC official said she had been told about the rival agency last September. “I thought it was crazy,” she said of the apparent duplication. “But sometimes the government does crazy things.”"}],[{"start":369.56,"text":"Peterside said the scandal — which he described as “chicken change” in terms of the amounts involved — was a distraction from more serious corruption. “I am more worried about $100mn or $200mn disbursed to legitimate agencies who fail to execute projects” than to smaller amounts going to a fictional agency, he said. “They love every distraction as they loot the nation blind.”"}],[{"start":393.68,"text":"Festus Akanbi, writing in daily newspaper This Day, said budgets had become filled with “padding” — a euphemism for fake expenditures — and that Nigerians had lost faith in the budgetary process."}],[{"start":405.96,"text":"Among the items in the budget that have invited ridicule is an allocation to the maritime agency to put up solar street lights, funds for the “empowerment” of traditional rulers and money to renovate 106 royal palaces, 11 of which have no physical location according to BudgIT, an NGO that monitors budget expenditure. The government did not respond to a request for comment."}],[{"start":428.36,"text":"“You cannot really trust a budget where many people have inserted unscrupulous and frivolous items,” said Adekaiyaoja of Bellwether. “If there were a rigorous process, what else do you think we would find?”"}],[{"start":445.48,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786274498_3342.mp3"}