In recent days, the media has been awash with the furore and hysteria over the fake agency scandal. 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.
The presidency and the federal government have since denounced the embattled Adeyemi as an imposter, the agency he claimed to be leading illegal and all his activities fraudulent. While the government is doing everything it can to exonerate itself from the imbroglio and portray it as the action of a lone conman who is plotting to undermine the government and tarnish the image of key officials, the facts of the matter and a dispassionate look at the sequence of events do not support this stance.
Since the fake agency scandal came to public knowledge and became a subject of intense debate, there has been a flurry of contradictory and inconsistent explanations on the circumstances surrounding the imbroglio. From the president’s media aide, Bayo Onanuga, claiming that Adeyemi used phoney and forged documents to open an account with the Central Bank of Nigeria to the Account General’s debunking of his claim, the whole situation portrays the government as trying too hard to disassociate itself from an embarrassing aberration that it’s either overlooked or helped orchestrate.
President Tinubu has ordered the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to carry out a full investigation into the scandal and submit findings within 30 days.
On Tuesday, Adeyemi, the man at the centre of the chaos, opened up on what transpired between him and Gbajabiamila and spoke on his relationship with the president’s chief of staff. Adeyemi, whose allegation that Gbajabiamila received N400 million through a middleman and demanded an additional N200 million to secure his appointment as the DG of PFIPC, while also requesting for another 48 per cent of the PFIPC’s N27.4 billion take-off grant, a request he said he rejected, brought public immense public attention to the scandal, made remarks that now adds fresh twists to the already convoluted and polarising matter.
Adeyemi, despite his earlier allegations, has now denied ever meeting personally with Gbajabiamila. He, however, said it was not within his power to confirm or deny Gbajabiamila’s involvement in the scandal engulfing the PFIPC. Adeyemi spoke from a discrete location to social media activist, Martins Vincent Otse, known as VeryDarkBlackMan (VDM)
His denial comes roughly 72 hours after Gbajabiamila’s legal team, Kemi Pinheiro, threatened him with legal action over the claims made against the Chief of Staff.
Early in the 16-minute-long video recording of their exchange, released on Tuesday, VDM disclosed that Adeyemi had called him first, and he returned the call once he realised who was on the line.
Opening the interview, VDM asked, “Let’s start with this: did you at any point in time meet with Femi Gbaja one-on-one to discuss this whole thing?”
Adeyemi answered, “No.” VDM probed further, asking, “Did you speak on the phone to discuss this whole thing?” Adeyemi answered in the affirmative, “Yes, like three times I’ve once spoken to him through my late friend, Dolapo Tanimola.”
Raising the possibility that someone else may be posing as Gbajabiamila, VDM asked, “How are you sure it was Gbaja? Did you speak to him on a video call? Anybody could have collected that phone.” Adeyemi replied, “No, it was not on video call.”
The self-acclaimed DG also concurred when VDM asked him to verify that “every transaction that was done was through your friend and that your friend is late.”
When VDM remarked, “If the Chief of Staff is coming to say he is not the one, it is possible (that he is not). In Nigeria, anything can happen,” Adeyemi responded, “Of course! Yes.” Asked whether Gbajabiamila might genuinely be oblivious of the graft or might be lying, Adeyemi said, “I wouldn’t say he is lying and I wouldn’t say he is saying the truth.”
He added that this confusion and uncertainty were the reason he urged President Tinubu to set up an investigation.
Adeyemi told VDM that he planned to turn himself in to the police or the DSS following the interview, though it remains unclear, as of this report, whether he has done so.
