Three weeks ago, I argued that the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission was not really investigating the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council; it was investigating itself.
The question I wrote was whether Nigeria’s anti-corruption agencies could apply to the highest offices in the land the same rigour they routinely apply to clerks, contractors and Yahoo Boys, or whether they exist mainly to manage embarrassment on behalf of the government that funds and can dismiss them.
On August 6, ICPC chairman, Musa Aliyu, answered that question, briefing President Bola Tinubu exactly 30 days after his July 7 directive.
The interim report, as disclosed, does not refute my thesis. It confirms it.
What the report establishes is, on its own narrow terms, unremarkable: Adeyemi was never appointed by the Federal Government; PFIPC was never created by any law, executive order or valid instrument; his appointment letter and supporting documents were forged; and PFIPC had unlawfully appropriated the identity, and even the physical office, of the defunct Presidential Economic Advisory Council, having broken into locked premises to do so.
The commission also disclosed two further fictitious bodies traceable to Adeyemi. Most of this had previously been substantially established by the police.
The ICPC, in essence, squandered 30 days confirming what was already on the record and recommending prosecution for nobody but the man everyone already suspected.
It is what the report does not do that condemns it. Mr Aliyu told correspondents that the investigation had identified officials whose acts of “commission, omission and negligence” facilitated PFIPC’s operations, and that it had found collaborators associated with the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Head of the Civil Service, the Accountant-General’s office and the Budget Office. Yet the commission’s recommendation for these officials, as is usually the case, is not prosecution but “administrative sanctions.”
Now, compare that with Adeyemi’s lawyers’ own account of what it actually took to get PFIPC into the 2026 budget: a budget code from the Accountant-General’s office, self-accounting status, 314 recruitment waivers from the Head of Service, sign-off from the Budget Office and the National Assembly, and a plaque of recognition and a N300 million “processing consideration” request from the EFCC. If even half of that is true, this was not the work of an unassisted forger. It was institutional capture. Yet only the forger is being tried.
ICPC leans heavily on one line of comfort: that “no Federal Government funds were approved or disbursed” to PFIPC, as something close to vindication. It is nothing of the sort:
- A N1.3 billion line survived into a signed Appropriation Act.
- Three hundred and fourteen jobs were cleared for hiring during an official recruitment freeze.
- Seven federal number plates were issued by the FRSC on the strength of PFIPC’s letterhead.
- Foreign-currency accounts were opened at the Central Bank. D
- Diplomats and cabinet officials sat in meetings with a man impersonating a federal agency.
None of that required even one naira to move to constitute a profound breach of state integrity. Measuring this scandal by whether cash changed hands is like measuring whether a crashed commercial aircraft was registered.
Nor does the interim report resolve the one question that has mattered from the outset: who, specifically, generated PFIPC’s budget code? State House has told the House adhoc committee it sent no correspondence to the Accountant-General’s office requesting one. Adeyemi himself, in a recorded interview released after his arrest, insists he personally lobbied Budget Office officials in December 2024, was turned away for the 2025 cycle, and was merely told to “keep in touch” for 2026.
Somewhere between a State House disclaiming responsibility and a suspect describing an ongoing relationship with unnamed Budget Office staff, a significant named official signed off on a budget code for a non-existent agency. ICPC does not even identify that Nigerian.
There is a structural reason for this reticence, one I flagged on July 26: this is an executive-ordered probe of an executive scandal, reporting to a President who had already declared “100% confidence” in his Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila. An investigator who reports to a principal who has pre-judged a central figure in the affair is not independent; he is managing a brief.
The discovery of two further phantom agencies ought to alarm us more than it appears to have alarmed the commission. It confirms what transparency researchers have long argued: that Nigeria’s federal bureaucracy is porous enough that a single individual could apparently manufacture three fictitious institutions and walk them through it.
The question, then, is not “how did ICPC catch Adeyemi?” It is: “how many more PFIPCs are sitting, undetected, inside the 2026 budget right now?” And, as I pointed out in my previous article, in which I identified a couple of curious items, what would happen if an independent body forensically audited three or four budgets back?
What should follow, now, is not the quiet filing away of an interim report. First, and especially if the government desires a sliver of public trust, Nigeria needs the independent, judicially anchored inquiry that opposition figures, senior lawyers and civil society groups have demanded from the beginning, insulated from the chain of command that produced this report.
Second, conversion of ICPC’s “administrative sanctions” language into criminal referral for every named official whose signature, code or waiver gave PFIPC its appearance of legitimacy: the same standard applied to Adeyemi.
Third, and as I have discussed, a forensic, agency-by-agency audit of the budget architecture across Nigeria’s federal MDAs for the past few years, to establish whether other phantom codes exist.
I reaffirm that on this matter, it is not PFIPC, but the ICPC, that is really on trial. Its own interim report, forensically thin on institutional accountability, generous on administrative language, and silent on the identity of the very officials it admits facilitated this fraud, is not a verdict of acquittal for the commission.
This is the clearest piece of evidence yet that the case against it should proceed. Because institutional anti-corruption in Nigeria has mutated into Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah’s chichidodo bird in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. It detests waste and dirt but feeds voraciously on maggot, which grows and thrives only in human waste. Our anti-corruption agencies, by default a veritable window into the soul of Nigerian governance, demonstrate daily chichidodo’s famous science.
But there are two sides to every story, they say. That is why I here and now offer this column, in 1000 words, to ICPC chairman Musa Aliyu, a “titled chief” in the Nigerian legal profession, for his commission’s “statement of defence” next Sunday.
Credit: Sonala Olumhense