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I first received a WhatsApp message about the scandal from famed University of Texas history professor Toyin Falola. I haven’t read it. I thought it was just another corruption scandal, the kind I have become tragically accustomed to.
A few days later, my friend, Professor Moses Ochonu, forwarded another version to me. I told him that Professor Falola, mentor to both of us, had already sent it to me but that I hadn’t bothered to read it because I was tired of such matters. But soon social media was filled with different aspects of the scandal and I could no longer ignore it.
I now put on hold the travelogue I had planned to write about my recent visit to Trinidad and Tobago, where I was invited to give a keynote speech at an international media and communications conference. Nigeria, as often happens, imposed its madness on my literary itinerary.
The story is almost too crazy to be true. One Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Mathew, also spelled in official statements as Adeyemi Adeniyi Matthew, introduced himself as Director General of the Presidential Council for the Promotion of Foreign Intervention, sometimes twinned with the Presidential Economic Advisory Council.
The Presidency now says that the body does not exist. In a disclaimer on June 11 and a more comprehensive statement on July 1, the State House said that Adeyemi was an impostor, that his nomination letter had been forged, that he had falsely presented himself as a presidential nominee, and that police had already filed criminal charges against him.
According to the presidency, the drama began when the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission reported in October 2025 that another alleged government body was operating in its orbit. Foreign Affairs also reportedly began to feel uneasy after Adeyemi had meetings with ambassadors. The chief of staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, then wrote to the DSS and the police to investigate what he described as forged letters of appointment.
Adeyemi was later arrested at an office in the Federal Secretariat compound in Abuja. Police reportedly searched his office and residence, found documents they called counterfeit, and accused him of operating 34 bank accounts, including nine in the names of allegedly fictitious entities. The Presidency alleges that he even used his documents to open a CBN account by deceiving the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation, even though no government money was transferred to the account.
If that were all, this would be a simple story of a brazen con man who finds a costume in the wardrobe of power and decides to wear it. But that’s not all.
Before the Presidency disowned him, Adeyemi and his counsel were not anonymous. He led a management team at the EFCC headquarters. Premium Times reported that the visit was part of a partnership aimed at strengthening Nigeria’s investment climate ahead of a proposed world investment summit.
PM News similarly reported that EFCC Chairman Ola Olukoyede received him and his team. In images and reports circulated later, the meeting with the EFCC took on even more symbolic weight due to claims that Adeyemi received an EFCC plaque. Whether or not every detail of that ceremonial exchange survives independent verification, the broader fact is that an alleged fake agency gained access to the nation’s premier anti-corruption institution, among several major institutions.
Perhaps the most curious thing is the appearance of the Council in the national budget. ICIR and Channels TV reported that the council was caught in the 2026 budget with more than $1.3 billion. This single fact transforms this from a case of imitation into a study in the porosity of the state.
An impostor can print a fake letter. Can design a fake letterhead. He can borrow solemn English from government circulars and paste a coat of arms onto a document. But how does a non-existent presidential council get into the budget?
The controversy over the .gov.ng domain deepens the absurdity. Nigeria’s .gov.ng domain should not be purchased by web designers along the way. It is reserved for government institutions and requires official authorization and verification. If pfipc.gov.ng existed and passed through the required government vetting protocols, then someone would have successfully forged documents through a dormant verification system or someone within the state would have lent them a hand. Both possibilities are harmful.
Adeyemi, for his part, did not go away quietly. He says he had a real date. He accused Gbajabiamila of raising 400 million naira through a power of attorney, demanding another 200 million naira and demanding 48% of an alleged take-off grant of 27.4 billion naira. He says his refusal to give up the stake caused his problems.
These are serious accusations, but they are still accusations. So far the public has not seen bank documents, messages, records and receipts that can independently ascertain these.
Adeyemi is not a neutral witness in his own case, so we cannot take the reality of his claims for granted. The Presidency and TheCable drew attention to his previous public self-fashioning as the leader of the World Youth Organization, which Nigerian newspapers once reported as a United Nations affiliate.
This claim was later disputed because there was no UN youth body in the form in which he made it. In other words, the man at the center of the PFIPC scandal appears to have a history of manufacturing closeness to large institutions.
But the Presidency should not celebrate too quickly. Adeyemi’s credibility problems do not absolve the state. A thief who steals a police uniform is a criminal. But if he uses the uniform to sleep in police barracks, command patrol vans, receive greetings from officers and collect allowances from the police budget, the scandal no longer belongs only to the thief. He belongs to the police.
This is why the most plausible explanation is not an ordered binary. It is not simply that Adeyemi beat the system. Nor has it yet been proven that Gbajabiamila co-planned the plan and then turned against him after an argument over sharing the spoils.
The publicly available evidence supports a more troubling middle ground. Adeyemi was probably the prime mover in an elaborate institutional fraud, but he almost certainly benefited from the complicity, negligence or habitual stupidity of the Nigerian bureaucracy.
Global parallels exist, but none are exact twins. In Gujarat, India, a man named Sandeep Rajput allegedly set up a fake Irrigation Projects Division office, forged seals and signatures, submitted official-looking proposals, and secured the release of more than 40 million Indian rupees in government grants. This is probably the closest parallel because it involved not only imitation but also entry into public finance.
Also in India, Kiran Patel allegedly posed as an official in the Prime Minister’s office and enjoyed official security and hospitality in Jammu and Kashmir before his arrest. His case is reminiscent of Adeyemi’s use of proximity to the presidency as a password for bureaucratic reverence.
In China, Zhao Xiyong posed as a State Council official, toured provinces, gave speeches, and was received by local leaders who apparently lacked the courage or curiosity to ask basic questions.
In Ghana, a fake American embassy operated for years, issued counterfeit visas and survived in part because corrupt officials were reportedly paid to look the other way.
These cases tell us something universal about power. Bureaucracies love symbols. A seal, a title, a convoy, a letterhead, a foreign-sounding summit, a grandiose acronym and a confident madman in a well-tailored suit can suspend institutional reason. In societies where hierarchy is fetishised, verification is often treated as disrespect or, as we like to say in Nigeria, “rudeness towards established authority”.
The Nigerian state is at once overbearing and absent, performative and incompetent, obsessed with protocol but contemptuous of process. He will ask a poor widow for an affidavit before paying her pension arrears, but allow a phantom council to stroll among elite institutions with the swagger of presidential legitimacy.
The question Nigerians should be pressing is not simply whether Adeyemi forged documents. The Presidency has expressed its opinion on the matter and the court will decide. The bigger question is who opened the doors.
Who gave him the office space? Who received his letters? Who authorized your delegation? Who developed his domain? Who inserted or did not eliminate the budget line? Who saw the words “Presidential Council for the Promotion of Foreign Intervention” and did not ask, “What law created this body?”
The scandal is not that Nigeria has produced a man bold enough to impersonate the state. Every country produces similar men. The scandal is that the Nigerian state, with all its security agencies, protocol offices, budget departments, domain regulators and anti-corruption theatrics, may have been too empty to notice that it was being impersonated by its own shadow.
Adeyemi may yet turn out to be a lone scam artist. Gbajabiamila could still be avenged. Or an independent investigation might uncover something darker. But what the public already knows is enough to impeach the system. A government that can be successfully imitated has already confessed to being indistinguishable from its counterfeit government.
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