News Archives - Church Times Nigeria - News, features and more

By Oyewole Sarumi PhD A Policy Essay on Institutional Impersonation, State Architecture and the Case for Radical Rationalisation of Nigeria’s Federal Bureaucracy Digital Transformation Architect and Leadership Specialist INTRODUCTION There is a peculiar kind of scandal that says less about the individual at its centre than about the system that allowed him to exist. The Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, or PFIPC as it came to be known, is precisely that kind of scandal. On the surface, it is the story of one man, a self-styled prince named Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, who is alleged to have forged a presidential appointment letter, built an office inside the Federal Secretariat, hosted diplomats and cabinet officials, and secured a budget line of roughly 1.3 billion naira in the 2026 Appropriation Act for an agency that, according to the Presidency, never legally existed. Beneath that surface, however, lies a far more consequential story about the Nigerian state itself: a story about how many institutions government has created, how loosely their boundaries are policed, and how easily the appearance of legitimacy can be manufactured inside a bureaucracy so large that even its own custodians struggle to say with certainty what does and does not belong to it. That is the argument this essay develops. The PFIPC affair should not be allowed to shrink into a courtroom drama about one impostor and one disputed signature. It should instead become the occasion for something Nigeria has needed for over a decade: the serious revival of the 2012 Oronsaye Report and its accompanying 2014 Federal Government White Paper, not as museum pieces to be cited in newspaper columns, but as the working baseline for a fundamental redesign of the machinery of the Nigerian federal government. My conclusion, stated plainly at the outset, is that the PFIPC scandal is not proof that the Nigerian state is fraudulent from top to bottom. It is, however, compelling evidence that the architecture of that state has become sufficiently complex, sufficiently fragmented and sufficiently opaque that impersonation, duplication and regulatory arbitrage have become structurally possible, almost routine. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who has already shown a willingness to absorb political pain for economic reform, now has the opportunity to do what several of his predecessors promised and failed to deliver: shrink the footprint of government without shrinking its capability. THE ANATOMY OF A PHANTOM AGENCY To understand why this matters, it helps to walk through what the PFIPC actually managed to do before its foundations were publicly questioned. For much of 2025, the council operated with all the outward trappings of a genuine federal agency. It had an office inside the Federal Secretariat complex in Abuja, the same compound that houses Nigeria’s substantive ministries. It ran a website on the official “.gov.ng” domain, a detail that alone should trouble anyone who assumes that domain administration inside government is tightly controlled. It obtained approval to recruit around 300 personnel at a time when the Federal Government had a general freeze on public sector hiring, a fact that itself raises the question of who authorised an exception for a body with no statutory existence. Its director-general met with cabinet ministers, financial regulators, the leadership of Nigeria’s anti-corruption architecture and foreign diplomats, according to reporting by the BBC’s Lagos bureau. In October 2025, the council reportedly hosted a dinner in Abuja pitched as a prelude to a World Investment Summit that was projected, in the council’s own promotional language, to attract something in the order of five trillion dollars in foreign direct investment, a figure so implausible on its face that it ought to have triggered scrutiny long before it did. Most tellingly, when the 2026 Appropriation Act was signed into law, the council was inside it, carrying a budget provision widely reported at around 1.3 billion naira, alongside a related entity, the Presidential Economic Advisory Council nomenclature, with a separate and much larger claimed take-off grant figure north of 27 billion naira that Adeyemi says he was asked to share with more senior officials. None of that happened in a vacuum. To secure a line in a national budget, an entity must pass through the Budget Office of the Federation, must have an administrative code created for it by the Accountant-General’s office, and in the ordinary course of things must be recognised in some form by the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, which is the institution that ordinarily allocates office space and administrative status to federal bodies. The Accountant-General of the Federation, Shamseldeen Ogunjimi, told the House of Representatives ad-hoc committee investigating the affair that his office created an administrative code for the Presidential Economic Advisory Council after receiving what appeared to be an authentic letter from the State House dated November 7, 2024, and that it was only later established that the letter had never in fact been issued by the State House. He was careful to stress that no public funds were ultimately released under salaries, overheads, capital or any special allocation, and that a separate request for a 27.4 billion naira establishment grant was rejected for lack of budgetary provision. That distinction between appropriation and actual expenditure is important, and any responsible account of this affair must preserve it. But the distinction, however important, does not answer the more fundamental governance question: how did a forged State House letter travel through the Treasury, the Budget Office and eventually into a National Assembly appropriation without a single institutional checkpoint stopping it along the way? THE WIDENING CIRCLE What began in June 2026 as a presidential disclaimer, dismissing the PFIPC as fictitious and describing Adeyemi as an impostor who had forged the signature of the Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, has since widened considerably. Adeyemi, for his part, has not accepted the impostor label quietly. He has insisted that the council was lawfully established in 2024 and that his own appointment was genuine, and he has gone further, publicly accusing Gbajabiamila of demanding a 48 per cent share of the council’s alleged 27.4 billion naira take-off grant, a demand he says he refused after already paying 400 million naira through proxies toward securing his appointment, with a further 200 million naira allegedly still outstanding. The Presidency, through the Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, has rejected these claims in detail, stating that the Office of the Chief of Staff was in fact the first to raise the alarm, writing to the Department of State Services and the police as early as October 2025 after receiving complaints from the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission that a parallel, unrecognised body appeared to be operating at cross purposes with it. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has separately told the House committee that it rebuffed three separate approaches from Adeyemi seeking its endorsement to host a World Investment Summit, and that the National Security Adviser’s office had confirmed to it, as far back as November 2025, that Adeyemi was unknown to any arm of the Federal Government. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has publicly called on President Tinubu to suspend Gbajabiamila pending an independent investigation, arguing that a press statement is not an adequate response to allegations of this gravity, and civil society groups including the Human and Environmental Development Agenda have echoed the demand that the Chief of Staff step aside while the facts are established. The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission has reportedly interrogated Gbajabiamila directly over his alleged role, even as his lawyers have issued a formal letter denying any relationship with Adeyemi, describing the allegations as false and defamatory, and threatening a ten billion naira damages claim should they not be retracted. The House of Representatives committee, chaired by Plateau lawmaker Yusuf Gagdi, has in the meantime catalogued something in the region of 29 separate allegedly forged documents connected to the affair, spanning fake presidential approvals, a purported forged Act of the National Assembly, and counterfeit correspondence attributed to the State House, the Head of Service, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation and the Ministry of Finance. A senior police officer representing the Inspector-General told the committee that signatures on disputed State House documents did not match authentic official correspondence obtained during investigations, a finding that, whatever else it proves, confirms that forgery on an institutional scale did in fact occur. I set out this widening circle of claim and counter-claim deliberately, not to adjudicate guilt, which is a matter for the courts and the anti-corruption commission, but to illustrate a point that matters more for policymakers than for prosecutors. Whether the ultimate finding is that Adeyemi acted entirely alone, or that he had quiet assistance from within government, the sheer number of institutional gates he is alleged to have passed through, undetected, for the better part of two years, tells us something about the gates themselves. WHY “ONE ROGUE IMPOSTOR” IS NOT A SUFFICIENT EXPLANATION It is tempting, and politically convenient, to resolve this entire episode into the simplest possible narrative: a single confidence trickster deceived a well-intentioned bureaucracy. That narrative has the advantage of protecting institutions from scrutiny and confining consequences to one individual. It also happens to be unconvincing to the people who understand Nigeria’s federal budgeting architecture best. Babachir Lawal, who himself once occupied the office of Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the very office responsible for allocating status and space to federal agencies, has been blunt in his assessment, arguing that there is no way that office, in a functioning system, would fail to recognise that an agency was fake, and that a budget code cannot be self-generated without the knowledge of the Budget Office, which in his view implies connivance somewhere inside the system. Oluseun Onigbinde, co-founder of the transparency organisation BudgIT, which first drew public attention to the council’s budget line, makes a related but distinct point. He notes that the PFIPC does not appear anywhere in the 2023, 2024 or 2025 budgets, and then surfaces fully formed, with its own administrative code, in 2026, a pattern that in his reading points toward the entity having emanated from the executive side of government rather than having been smuggled in through parliamentary insertion. He lists the sequence any genuine agency must pass through, an office inside the Federal Secretariat, sign-off from the civil service, a budget code, and multi-step approval to open a bank account, and concludes that the “lone impostor” explanation does not adequately account for how all of those tracks were cleared simultaneously. His formulation is worth repeating in something close to its own terms: the government, in his view, owes the public honesty about who exactly was involved, not simply the punishment of the man left holding the story. None of this requires assuming the worst about every official who touched the file. It requires only accepting an uncomfortable structural truth, one that this essay treats as its analytical centre. A government that has accumulated so many ministries, departments, agencies, councils, commissions, committees, programmes and quasi-governmental bodies that even its own most senior administrators cannot immediately distinguish the real from the counterfeit has, by that fact alone, created the conditions in which a PFIPC becomes possible. The forgery was the proximate cause. The institutional sprawl was the enabling condition. Fix only the former, and Nigeria will read about a second version of this story within a few years, wearing a different name and a different acronym. THE ORONSAYE REPORT REVISITED: WHAT IT ACTUALLY SAID This is where the Oronsaye Report becomes not merely relevant but indispensable. The report emerged from the work of the Presidential Committee on the Rationalisation and Restructuring of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies, chaired by Stephen Oronsaye, a former Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, and its accompanying White Paper remains accessible today through the Bureau of Public Service Reforms and the Nigerian National Library’s archival holdings. Its diagnosis, more than a decade old now, was disarmingly simple: Nigeria had created too many government institutions performing overlapping, duplicated or poorly differentiated functions, and the White Paper itself traces this back to the historical drift of the Federal Government from core policy and administrative functions into direct participation across an ever-widening range of sectors. …

News

RCCG founder’s daughter debunks media reports on father’s legacy

Towards the redemption of America

PFN President blows hot over anti-bus evangelism bill, says “we are ready for prison”

We need a militant Church says Ex-President Obasanjo @ LAWMNA golden jubilee

“You can’t divide us” Northern Christians tell Bwala, say, ‘Catholic bishops spoke for Nigerians during meeting with Tinubu’

RCCG 74th Convention: Pastor Adeboye draws divine lessons from boxing legend Muhammad Ali

Apostolic Church LAWMNA begins Golden Jubilee Convention, urges participants to be more committed to God.

Archbishop Onaiyekan alleges President Tinubu bent on winning 2027 Election “at all costs”

Hayab congratulates Akanji, outgoing President, Nigerian Baptist Convention, says, his leadership “fostered unity”

Ghost in the machinery: the PFIPC scandal and Nigeria’s overdue reckoning with Oronsaye report