While the presidency wants Nigerians to believe that this is a case of a sophisticated, elaborate and well-thought-out scheme, product of a meticulously plotted graft designed to hoodwink government officials and steal public funds, the facts of the matter do not support or validate this stance. The Whole scandal reads less like an institutional failure but more like a thread of conspiracy woven sloppily but a gang of avaricious top government officials.
For weeks, the president has been embroiled in an appalling and chaotic bribery scandal that has put an already deeply unpopular government, battling to gain public trust and secure positive public perception, on the verge of a brutal and damaging reputational crisis.
The allegations are astounding, staggering and jarring. This is not a mere case of administrative oversight and bureaucratic clumsiness but a case of what happens when grace, altruism, discipline and fastidiousness are sacrificed on the altar of greed and impunity. But how did Gbajabiamila, one of the powerful figures in the current administration, get entangled in a messy stranger-than-fiction bribery scandal that many now say is a reflection of Tinubu’s antecedents and what his presidency now embodies?
At the centre of the scandal is a triumvirate. The Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), one Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi who is said to be the Director General of the agency and Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff, to President Bola Tinubu.
Last week, Gbajabiamila in his capacity as Chief of Staff, issued a public statement saying the PFIPC was a phoney entity and not an official government body. The statement was the beginning of something ominous. A harbinger of distress. After the public declaration of PFIPC as a fake and fictitious body, Adeyemi, whose position as the DG of the organisation is now in peril, did not waste time to fight back as he pushed to gain control of the narrative while establishing the legitimacy of his position and the agency he leads.
At a press conference last Thursday, Adeyemi made startling allegations, one that further put the administration in the crosshairs of a disenchanted citizenry. He alleged that Gbajabiamila, received N400 million through a middleman and demanded an additional N200 million to secure his appointment as the DG of PFIPC. He also said the chief of staff demanded 48 per cent of the PFIPC’s N27.4 billion take-off grant, a request he said he rejected.
Adeyemi stated that the move to discredit him by labelling him a fraud and the denial of the agency’s existence were because of his refusal to meet the alleged demands of the president’s chief of staff and also attempt to “silence legitimate questions.”
“The major rationale behind the disagreement between me and the chief of staff is that he allegedly requested 48 per cent of the take-off grant (N27,395,510,136) from the same agency, which he denies, to which I rejected after he collected a total sum of 400 million by proxy, with a remaining balance of 200 million to secure the said appointment,” Adeyemi said.
He accused Gbajabiamila of attempting to frame him as a con artist and planning to use security agencies to hound and portray his diplomatic meetings as espionage or disloyalty. Adeyemi also wondered why Mr Gbajabiamila issued the disclaimer instead of President Tinubu’s media aides and challenged him to make available documents and communication trails from the president’s office for examination.
He further alleged that he survived an assassination attempt along the Abuja-Kaduna Expressway on September 7, 2025, during which, he said, vital documents and his phones were carted away. “I reported the case to the police and Department of State Security. I was told the phones were tracked to Gombe State, but an insider confided to me that there was an order from above to refrain from taking any further actions,” he stated.
The presidency steps in, clears Gbajabiamila of any wrongdoing
On Wednesday, the presidency issued a statement denouncing Adeyemi as a fraud, swindler and a con artist. In a statement by the media aide to the president on Wednesday, the office of the chief of staff first raised alarm and drew the attention of relevant authorities to the illegal activities of Adeyemi last October. According to the presidency, the Chief of Staff, wrote to the DSS and the Police asking them to investigate the activities of ‘fraudsters and impostors’ forging appointment letters purportedly from his office.
The petition read: “The attention of this office has been drawn to the activities of certain individuals and groups engaged in the forgery of official appointment letters purportedly issued from my office. The fake documents, bearing falsified signatures, reference/folio numbers, and seals, have been used to claim leadership appointments to non-existent entities, with particular reference to the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council.
“The aforementioned entity under the leadership of one Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew as Director-General is said to have an office at the Federal Secretariat Complex Phase 111, 2nd Floor. Also, they have been parading themselves as a legitimate government agency, hosting meetings with both foreigners and Nigerian citizens, and even going so far as to request a note verbale from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the United States of America to facilitate visas for some of their staff.
“The above development not only constitutes a serious criminal act but also undermines the integrity of the presidency and the credibility of official government communication.
“I therefore urge you to initiate a thorough investigation to identify and apprehend those involved and also to uncover the network facilitating the forgery,” the Chief of Staff wrote in his petition to the security agencies
According to the presidency, after the chief of staff’s public disassociation from Adeyemi, a series of enquiries to ascertain the legality of Adeyemi’s position began. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Office of the National Security Adviser and the Office of the Secretary General of the Federation were all involved in the investigation and the conclusion that was reached is that Adeyemi is a fraud
The presidency disclosed that “The police were able to establish that the agency Adeyemi purportedly headed was fictitious, that he forged his appointment letter and the documents recovered in his office and home, that he falsely paraded himself as a government appointee, and that he falsely solicited a note verbal from the Foreign Affairs Ministry to enable him and his staff to obtain US visas. The police also found that Adeyemi operated 34 bank accounts, with nine opened in the names of his fictitious agencies, known as the FCT Investment Promotion Agency and the Public Private Partnership (FIPA-APP), and the FCT Investment Promotion Act.”
The unanswered questions and what is left unsaid.
While the chief of staff and the presidency have been aggressive and relentless not just proclaiming their innocence but in exonerating themselves from the imbroglio, one cannot help but see the barely concealed prevarications and evasions in their strongly worded statements and rebuttals.
If the Presidency wants us to believe that Prince Adeyemi is “a con artist who appears to have built a web of false claims to deceive unsuspecting government officials and the public into playing by his scam book, then it must answer pertinent hard questions.
If Adeyemi was a grifter and the PFIPC that he led was a fake entity masquerading as an official government institution, then the question is how he was able to operate for over a year, with a known office at the federal secretariat, a domiciliary account, a pounds account, and a treasury single account, all of which are domiciled with the Central Bank of Nigeria.
How did he open an account with the CBN without being flagged and detected as a potential fraud? You cannot even open a savings account with a commercial bank without painstaking and meticulous scrutiny of the documents and identity cards you provided, part of which includes a physical visit to the address of residence you claim to live at, which is on the documents you submitted. So it beggars belief that a man we are now being told is a ‘con artist’ somehow bypassed the multi-layered gruelling verification stages and intense due diligence to open multiple accounts that are linked to the federal government’s own treasury single account (TSA) without anyone raising an alarm.
Part of the KYC requirements to open a CBN account is the Accountant General of the Federation authorisation, how did Adeyemi get the Accountant General’s approval to open the account, one would expect that such authorisation is usually verified by the CBN, usually by reaching out to the office of the Accountant General to confirm if the authorisation indeed came from it, before opening the account. It is also important to note that the Account General cannot unilaterally authorise the opening of an account with the CBN. He needs the express approval of the minister of finance who must in turn obtain the approval of the president.
Furthermore, if the PFIPC is a non-existent and phantom agency that was ‘created’ by a notorious grifter, how come the agency appeared on pages 50 and 51 of the 2026 appropriation budget with ₦1.3 billion allocated to it? How did a fake federal government agency headed by a supposed dubious charlatan secure a line item in the budget?
Adeyemi also met with numerous high-ranking government officials and influential politicians of the ruling party. He met with the deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, Ben Kalu, and the chairman of Nigeria’s foremost anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC. He also had diplomatic engagements with officials of foreign nations.
Also, the circumstances surrounding the sudden and mysterious death of the middleman, Babatunde Tanimola, whom Adeyemi claimed facilitated the link-up with Gbajabiamila and also witnessed the transaction, have not been unravelled. The police died in a “fire accident at a hotel in Utako, Abuja, on 22nd of October, 2025.”
He also claimed he lost his phone and other devices which contained proof of his allegations against Gbajabiamila and efforts to get the police to track and recover these devices have proved abortive.
Theseas questions have not been convincingly answered and dismissively labelling Adeyemi a fraud only triggers more questions.
While the presidency wants Nigerians to believe that this is a case of a sophisticated, elaborate and well-thought-out scheme, product of a meticulously plotted graft designed to hoodwink government officials and steal public funds, the facts of the matter do not support or validate this stance. The whole imbroglio reads less like an institutional failure but more like a thread of conspiracy woven sloppily by a gang of avaricious top government officials.
There is no way one looks at the entire impasse that the presidency and by extension the federal government does not come off horrible and disgusting. If we are to believe that what happened was orchestrated by an unscrupulous fecund mind who fooled, hoodwinked and blindsided a plethora of well-equipped and adequately staffed federal agencies who were actually set up to prevent things like this from happening, it then goes to show how worryingly incompetent and disgracefully sloppy the government of the day is. And if Adeyemi perpetrated his massive sham in cahoots with persons at the highest level of governance, then it shows how supremely corrupt and criminally hopeless the government is. Head or toes, the government bears the brunt.
