Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
The Tinubu presidency is caught in a web from its own DNA. A grand Ponzi scheme, born and bred in the bowels of the presidency, has burst into the open. A famous con man ostensibly hired by highly placed officials has been exposed. His elaborate scheme of floating a phantom government agency has been unraveled. The culprits are running from pillar to post to save their jobs and naked buttocks. But the public is hardly impressed.
The public is being deceived into seeing the credibility of the incumbent administration as being on the line. Government is acting like a drunken monkey stung by a thousand bees. It has taken the phantom Director General of the rogue agency to court. It has also quickly empaneled an investigation into how a con artist floated a government agency with the lofty prefix of “Presidential Council”. The whole raging argument about the phantom Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) headed by one Adeniyi Adeyemi is all a hoax. Every step that the government has so far taken to wash its hands off this scandal seems to point straight back at the administration. What went wrong?
From what has so far been made public, the government has taken itself to court. It is also investigating the existence of a monster of its own creation. An unusual government agency, the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC) and its Director General one Mr. Adeniyi Adeyemi to court ostensibly for floating and running a full-fledged fake federal government agency with all full paraphernalia. The agency is said to have been operating from a full –blown furnished government-allocated office in the federal secretariat for over half a year.
According to the pervasive narrative, the fake agency was allocated a copious furnished office in the Federal Secretariat. It was also allowed a waiver to hire a staff complement of over 300. It was also granted full budgetary status and its budget duly passed through the National Assembly budget process. Beyond having its budget passed and over N1.3 bn was allocated to it in the 2026 budget. The agency had an account duly opened for it in the Central Bank and over 34 other bank accounts in commercial banks. The agency which has been operating for close to one year had all the paraphernalia and rituals of a full federal agency. It held meetings with sister agencies, communicated with foreign missions and international agencies as all legitimate government agencies do.
Suddenly, a whistle went off. Mr. Adeniyi Adeyemi has named names and charges. These include the names of officials who are too close to the apex of power in Abuja. The charges include demands for and payments of unprintable quantum of funds to the highly placed official enablers.
Following the bursting of the Ponzi agency, relevant government offices began to do what they do best: exchange silly communications to appear concerned. Letters flew back and forth between powerful offices. From the National Security Adviser to the DSS, the Police ,SGF etc.. questioning the legitimacy of the agency.
For close to one year since late 2025 to the present, this Mickey Mouse pretense to serious official concern continued leading belatedly to the institution of a law suit against Mr. Adeniyi Adeyemi and his Ponzi agency only in the last couple of weeks. Mr. Adeyemi however insists that his agency was duly established and that his appointment to head it emanated from the highest quarters. No one knows what the fact is, since Mr. Adeyemi insists that he will tender his exhibits in court.
Meanwhile, the go-between who arranged his appointment and liaised between him and the office of the president’s Chief of Staff has reportedly died!
In spite of spirited efforts by the presidency to disown Mr. Adeyemi and his phantom agency, what cannot be denied is that a streak of fraud and phantom schemes runs deep in the DNA of the APC and the Tinubu establishment.
In the run-up to the 2023 presidential elections, there was deafening public noise about the religious combination of the APC presidential ticket. Nigerians, ever so sensitive to religious matters, were incensed that Mr. Tinubu had chosen to run a Muslim-Muslim ticket with Mr. Shettima as his running mate. On the day of Shettima’s unveiling at the Musa Yar’dua Centre in Abuja, drama overwhelmed common sense.
The majority of the untidy assemblage of ‘clergy’ that thronged the Shehu Musa Yar’dua Centre to grace the unveiling of Mr. Kassim Shettima to President Buhari as Mr. Bola Tinubu’s presidential running mate for 2023 were fake. Interestingly, the public was hardly shocked about the travesty, being so used to a political class that is endlessly resourceful in its creativity for good and for ill.
Most of the hirelings were in such a hurry to don their clerical costumes for the show that they dressed up in a car park nearby. An indiscriminate recruitment drive yielded a mixed bag of Okada riders, mechanics, jobless housewives, ladies of the night and motor park touts. Their recruiters had improvised clerical gear on the ready: choristers gowns, cheap school graduation gowns, left over Father Christmas apparel etc. Being so garishly attired, the chorus was chaperoned into the hallowed chambers of the presidential villa as ‘Christian clerics’ from across the country massed in solidarity with the APC presidential ticket.
They were all ‘unknown’ men of God summoned to an urgent earthly mission of playing ‘holy’ men for less than a day in return for a handsome payout of political cash. In a country that has become world famous for ‘unknown gunmen’, unknown bandits as well as sundry other tribes of troublemakers, the addition of fake bishops and unknown men of God is only a comic addition to an unfolding national political tragedy. It was indeed a dress rehearsal towards a presidency that would feature many fake identities and Ponzi schemes.
Fast forward to the actual presidential campaign itself. In gathering after gathering, rally after rally, Tinubu’s handlers had perfected a new political language for their principal. The man of the hour had suddenly been afflicted by a speech defect. We had the “Ba BaBluu” lingo, a strange unrecognizable political language that no one could understand. Tinubu had literally nothing to say to the rallies. His henchmen went to town with two divergent explanations. One was that the man was afflicted with a strange vocal illness. The public was enjoined to sympathize with the man rather than be astonished or amused . Another version was that the man’s speeches had been doctored by his opponents with computer viruses to misrepresent him.
When he went to Chatham House in London to make his stsr presentation, Mr. Tinubu refused to answer a questions himself but instead outsourced his responses to members of his entourage, including my friend Nasir El-Rufai. Another dress rehearsal towards a Ponzi presidency. But after his swearing-in at Eagle Square, Tinubu regained his speech capability. After reading his inauguration script, the first off-script statement he made was: “Fuel subsidy is gone!” No more “Ba Ba blu” and all the campaign gibberish! We had been scammed!
Enter the presidency itself. All manner of inconsequential people entered the cabinet list and some were actually cleared and confirmed by Akpabio’s Senate, including a woman who had cleverly avoided the NYSC. Another one had literally no educational qualifications and ended up paying monies meant for poverty alleviation into her friend’s personal bank account before the fraud was detected and she was relieved of the ministerial honey pot.
Still on the presidential train. Shortly after he assumed office, Mr. Tinubu decided that the planes in the Presidential fleet were all old and not befitting. He needed a new luxury jet to undertake his presidential junkets. There was hardly any bidding for the purchase of a new presidential jet. No known procurement procedure.
The tale is that a used Airbus had been found somewhere in the neighborhood of Europe. It had reportedly been owned by some Arab client who defaulted on a financing credit from Deutsche Bank. The plane had been repossessed by the bank and put up fpr sale. An agent of the Nigerian presidency located it and arranged to buy the second-hand plane for our president. While arguments and debates about appropriation and due process were going on in Abuja, the plane had been paid for. It was being adorned in Nigerian colours and Nigerian Air Force livery and refitted ready for delivery to the President on one of his numerous visits to Paris. That is another Ponzi scheme by this administration. No questions asked. Nothing investigated. Public money spent without due process, NASS approval or procurement process.
In the business of government itself, this administration has been known for reckless abuse of due process. Take the mega projects it prides itself in. Most of them are proceeding on the basis of contracts awarded in defiance of all known procurement due processes. The controversial Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway was awarded with hardly any public competitive bidding for a sum that keeps fluctuating and funded largely with all manner of loans approved arbitrarily by the National Assembly. The contractor is a certain Hiteck Construction Company. The same company is similarly awarded the over 1,000 km Sokoto-Badagry Highway contract. Only recently, construction of the Gombe-Biu highway was similarly announced as having been awarded to the same Hiteck Construction Company. In none of these mega construction projects is the public aware of any advertised bids, tenders or due process procurement processes. They are all fait accompli done deals.
Clearly then, Ponzi contracts, fraudulent transactions and microwave loan approvals and legislative arbitrariness have been the trademarks of this administration. The Adeyemi phantom Presidential Foreign Investment Intervention agency therefore falls in the line of the patented behavior of this administration. We can only dredge the long-term systemic implications of this pattern of crime scene behavior for the health and future of the Nigerian state.
This PFIC controversy and its accompanying scandal is at bottom a national security crisis. That a bunch of rascals from within and outside government can infiltrate the apparatus of State from the citadel of power to the basic strategic organs of state- the budget mechanism, the legislative process, the financial nexus and its control mechanisms – for several months without an alarm or detection is cause for serious concern. It indicates that the organs of state are fragile and prone to multiple institutional sabotage.
Mr. Adeyemi has named his enablers and collaborators in in highest places of power. Even ahead of legal and investigative proof, that the citadel of power should be manned by individuals whose credibility is minimally doubtful raises serious concerns about the basic credibility of the Tinubu presidency and the company it keeps.
The disorderly response of the government to the crisis worsens the administration’s crisis of competence and credibility. Why wait for close to a year before taking action towards establishing the authenticity of an agency that parades a “Presidential” tag? Why sue a proven con man instead of arresting him and treating him like any other common impersonator and criminal? Why refer an illegal or fake agency to the ICPC? Is that not a tacit recognition of the official status of the fake agency? Is the ICPC established to investigate common criminal organizations out there in the streets?
Above all, the antecedents of Mr. Adeyemi are so lavishly fraudulent that his curriculum vitae as a known con man should not have escaped the DSS and EFCC if indeed these agencies mean business. The phantom agency was not operating in secret. It was lavish and full of the pomp and ceremony associated with our numerous federal agencies.
For whatever it is worth, this crisis should trigger more than an investigation of just this one rogue agency. It calls for a comprehensive audit of the entire gamut of all the agencies in the federal bureaucratic behemoth: what they do; where they are located; how they are funded; their budget status and banking and financial standing, etc. The National Assembly should now establish the composition of the federal bureaucracy and its many agencies and make its findings available to the public.
In the final analysis, the Tinubu administration would do itself a great service if it takes one sensible step: suspend from office all government officials that Mr. Adeyemi has fingered pending the completion of the investigation and legal processes.
