By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Nigeria is one country where scandals break at the speed of light. As a public commentator, you can hardly keep pace.
On May 15, terrorists raided three schools in the Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State, abducting 46 people, including 39 schoolchildren. The victims, who include seven teachers and a toddler, have spent almost two months at God knows where. Two teachers were killed – one of them during the raid while the other, Mr. Michael Oyedokun, a mathematics teacher, was beheaded in captivity.
On the same day, terrorists struck in Borno State, whisking away more than 50 schoolchildren from Mussa Central Primary and Junior Secondary Schools in Askira-Uba Local Government Area. Most of the children are below the age of 10. Despite the initial outrage, Nigerians have moved on as they are wont to do.
Scandals have a very short lifespan in Nigeria. And our leaders know that for sure, which is why they always sit it out no matter how heinous, knowing that after one week, the rage will be over.
One month after the schoolchildren abductions, retired Major General Rabe Abubakar, former Director of Defence Information, who was abducted alongside his wife on May 30 in Katsina State, died in captivity. He has been forgotten.
More students have been kidnapped since the Oriire abductions. On June 29, terrorists attacked Government Day Secondary School in Lassa, in the beleaguered Askira-Uba Local Government Area, abducting dozens of students writing NECO examinations. Two teachers and one soldier were killed during the assault.
Notwithstanding the fact that troops of Operation Hadin Kai swiftly rescued 10 of the victims, including a vice principal, teachers, and NECO candidates, 37 of the children and women selling food items within the school premises remain unaccounted for. Barely one week after families of the victims staged peaceful protests demanding urgent government intervention, nobody is talking about the remaining captives again. Nigerians, inured to scandals, no matter how horrendous, have moved on.
In between these scandalous security breaches, there are financial scandals. On Wednesday, July 1, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) resident representative in Nigeria, Christian Ebeke, said the country had about 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) worth of public spending (about N8.83 trillion) not recorded in recent official budgets.
The implication, as Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in the 2027 elections, noted, is that the Tinubu administration is awarding multi-trillion-naira contracts, moving massive public capital, and commissioning infrastructure projects entirely beyond the reach of the Auditor-General, the nation’s procurement laws, and the legitimate oversight of the National Assembly. He calls it “a parallel fiscal universe” governed by executive whim and shielded from constitutional accountability. Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC), calls it “horrible.”
Yet, less than one week thence, the story has disappeared, literally, from the news.
Why? Because another scandal has supplanted it. This time, it is one Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, Director-General of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), an agency the Tinubu administration claims is non-existent.
Adeyemi demurs, insisting that the agency not only exists but has the imprimatur of the presidency. The problem, he claims, is his refusal to give President Tinubu’s Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, 48 per cent of the agency’s N27.4 billion takeoff grant as allegedly demanded after paying N400 million to secure the job, with an outstanding N200 million to pay.
The presidency hurriedly queued behind Gbajabiamila, one of their own. Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga urged Nigerians not to allow Adeyemi, a “con artist” with a history of fraudulent misrepresentation, to hoodwink them. The police, Onanuga further claimed, had investigated the matter and established that the agency Adeyemi headed was fictitious. The police also found out, according to the presidency, Gbajabiamila’s primary constituency, that Adeyemi forged his appointment letter, falsely paraded himself as a government appointee, falsely solicited a note verbale from the Foreign Affairs Ministry to enable him and his staff to obtain US visas, operated 34 bank accounts, and used fake documents to open a CBN account.
And then, an unforced error. The police also uncovered, Onanuga revealed, that the middleman between Adeyemi, the con artist, and Gbajabiamila, Tinubu’s guardian angel, Dolapo Babatunde Tanimola, “died in a fire incident at Kachi Hotel in Abuja” on October 22, 2025, five days before Adeyemi’s arrest. The suspect’s star witness died mysteriously before the police mustered the courage to file charges against him in court. How convenient!
But the presidency’s defence of Gbajabiamila has raised more questions than it provided answers. How possible is it for one private citizen to invent a presidential agency, forge his own appointment letter, secure office space inside the Federal Secretariat, recruit staff, hold meetings with diplomats, correspond with government institutions, open a CBN account through official channels, and wangle his “fake” agency’s way into the Appropriation Act with an allocation running into billions? If one man can pull off this scam, Nigeria has, indeed, become worse than a banana republic under Tinubu’s watch.
But the truth remains that Onanuga’s narrative, as usual, beggars belief. There are simply too many moving parts. The questions that need to be answered are: Who assigned the office space at the National Secretariat? Who created the budget line for the “non-existent” agency? Who approved it? Who authorised staff postings? Who facilitated CBN account opening? Was the N27.4 billion takeoff grant paid? If yes, by whom? If no, with which funds was the agency run? Already, the Senate has washed its hands off the mess, pushing it back to the executive.
Apparently, the Tinubu regime takes Nigerians for fools. Onanuga, as Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, speaks for the president. In his July 1 statement earlier referenced, he claimed that the police, having thoroughly investigated Adeyemi on the strength of Gbajabiamila’s October 17, 2025 petition to the DSS and police, found him solely responsible for his crime, arrested him on October 27, 2025, and filed an eight-count charge against him at the Federal High Court in Abuja on November 27, 2025. The matter was subsequently adjourned to July 27, 2026.
Simply put, Adeyemi is currently standing trial on charges of conspiracy, forgery, and impersonation, prosecuted by the Tinubu regime, with Gbajabiamila and 10 others as prosecution witnesses.
So, how can the same Tinubu order another “thorough investigation” when he had already cleared Gbajabiamila of any culpability? In any case, the same president who is ordering a thorough investigation just appointed Gbajabiamila a member of the Presidential Working Group saddled with the responsibility of preparing the legal framework for implementing state police across the country. Ideally, if Tinubu wants a “thorough investigation,” Gbajabiamila would have been asked to step aside until the investigation is concluded. That is global best practice. Stepping aside is not a pronouncement of guilt on him. It strengthens the process and creates the impression of fairness.
Rather than doing that, the presidency is trying so hard to convict Adeyemi in the court of public opinion and using state might to crush him even before he gets the chance of having his day in the courts.
On Monday, police raided the Ogbomosho home of his parents and arrested his father. The same day Gbajabiamila threatened a N10 billion suit over what he called Adeyemi’s defamatory remarks. His counsel, Kemi Pinheiro, gave him 72 hours to take down all videos and comments in which he made allegations that are “malicious, reckless and entirely without factual foundation” and targeted at showing Gbajabiamila as “corrupt, morally bankrupt, and a murderer,” also ordered him to “cease and desist from making, repeating, publishing or causing to be published any further defamatory statements concerning our client,” and also “provide our law firm with a written undertaking that you shall refrain from making any further defamatory statements concerning our client.”
This is sheer legal subterfuge and presidential high-handedness. Nigerians are not impressed. The PFIPC saga is one scandal too many. The joke is on the Tinubu presidency. What exposed this is not the altruism of some high-minded public officials. No! It is the result of a sharing formula that went awry when thieves refused to abide by the honour dictum among them. Nigerians should be worried about the many more illegal MDAs that remain uncovered because the villains are faithful to their sharing formula.
*Amaechi, a commentator on public issues, is the publisher of TheNiche newspaper (ikechukwuamaechi@yahoo.com)
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