Who Are the Three Permanent Secretaries Suspended by Tinubu Over Alleged Fake Government Agency? Full Details

President Bola Tinubu has dealt severely with another instance of impersonation within the federal civil service by having three permanent secretaries suspended immediately and arresting a man who is accused of running a fake government office from within the backyard of the Presidential Villa.

The directive, which was announced on Friday, is the most recent development resulting from a growing anti-corruption investigation that has already revealed at least two fake federal agencies operating with great boldness right under the nose of the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF).

Following his second meeting with the president in two days, Dr Musa Adamu Aliyu, SAN, Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), gave a briefing to the journalists from State House in Abuja. He stated to the reporters that the ICPC’s investigators had come across yet a further unauthorized organisation which refers to itself as the “National Brands Development and Made-in-Nigeria Special Project Office”. This office, with all the outward signs of a genuine government department, had managed to obtain physical premises inside the OSGF complex, even though no presidential approval had been given.

After the briefing, Aliyu stated that the president had issued two firm instructions: that the man accused of having masterminded the scheme should be arrested immediately and that three senior civil servants should be suspended since their positions had allowed them to have let the fraud continue.

According to the ICPC chairman, the officials placed on immediate suspension are:

Each of them acts as a permanent secretary for organisations falling within the jurisdiction of the OSGF, the influential office currently led by Senator George Akume; their suspension means that they are deprived of their duties until the ICPC has completed its investigation into the way in which a fictitious agency obtained office space and, apparently, a certain degree of institutional legitimacy without anyone raising an alarm.

The president also directed the immediate arrest of Prince George Buchi Nwabueze, who had been identified by the ICPC as the promoter of the fraudulent National Brands Development and Made-in-Nigeria Special Project Office. Aliyu stated that Nwabueze had been using no fewer than four different names, namely George Nathan, George Nathan Nwabueze, Hon. George Buchi Nwabueze, and simply George Nwabueze, a practice which investigators believe shows a deliberate attempt to avoid scrutiny while appearing to be a legitimate government official.

Security agencies have since been put on to locate him, with the police and other law enforcement units allegedly searching for him.

This most recent discovery was not the result of a standalone investigation. It arose from a more extensive inquiry which Tinubu had instructed to be carried out about a month before, into the now-famous Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC), another body which was later established to be completely fictitious. Upon submitting on 6 August the interim report of ICPC concerning that investigation, exactly thirty days after the president had given the order, the commission noted that its investigation had uncovered two further fake organisations operating in the same way. The announcement of Friday seems to be the second of these two agencies to be fully revealed.

In the PFIPC case, the ICPC had previously recommended that action should be taken against Adeniyi Adeyemi, who styled himself as Director-General, on charges of forgery and impersonation. It was during that incident that the State House was obliged to make a public statement denying that it had ever authorised the establishment of such a council, while the Federal Road Safety Corps admitted that it had issued number plates associated with the fictitious organisation—a fact which showed clearly how deeply these bogus agencies had managed to embed themselves in ordinary government procedures.

For most Nigerians who have been following the matter, the greater concern does not lie simply in the fact of one fraudster who has a stylish title and works out of a rented office. Rather, it is the question of how such an operation could have managed to take up room in one of the most sensitive branches of government, remaining completely undetected, for so long. The decision to suspend three permanent secretaries shows that Tinubu’s government is viewing this not just as the action of a single con artist, but as a possible failure of internal supervision within the civil service itself.

The ICPC states that its investigation is still going on, and Aliyu has made it clear that the commission will keep talking to officials of the OSGF in order to obtain further details. It is not yet known whether the permanently suspended secretaries will eventually be cleared, reappointed, or undergo further disciplinary action which might even involve criminal proceedings, and this will probably come down to what the investigators find out about their actual knowledge of, or involvement in, the way the fake office came about.

The story is still developing and further details will be expected as the ICPC’s investigation moves forward.