By Geraldine Onyenweaku
Nigeria’s federal budget is designed to pass through some of the country’s toughest financial and legal safeguards before a single naira is appropriated. Yet, despite those checks, the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), an agency the Presidency now says was never lawfully created, found its way into the 2026 Appropriation Act with an allocation of more than ₦1.3 billion, exposing what may be one of the biggest institutional failures in recent years.
The federal budget originates in the Executive, where the Ministry of Finance and the Budget Office compile spending proposals submitted by Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs). The President then presents the Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly, where lawmakers scrutinise the estimates through committee hearings before passing the bill for presidential assent. The 1999 Constitution reinforces the process through Sections 80, 81, and 85, which require legislative approval for public spending, annual presentation of budget estimates by the President, and independent audits by the Auditor-General.
Ordinarily, only agencies established by law, executive approval, or another lawful instrument should receive public funds. Each MDA is also expected to defend its budget before the Budget Office and relevant committees of the National Assembly. Those safeguards were meant to prevent fictitious organisations from entering the budget. In the PFIPC case, however, they appear to have been bypassed or failed altogether.
According to reports, the PFIPC operated for months from the Federal Secretariat in Abuja with office space, official letterheads, a website, Central Bank-linked accounts, and engagements with government institutions and foreign diplomats, despite the Presidency’s insistence that no such agency legally existed. Investigators believe the scheme gained credibility after a forged appointment letter bearing the alleged signature of the President’s Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, was accepted without proper verification, paving the way for Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi to present himself as the council’s Director-General. From there, the agency reportedly obtained a budget code, appeared in the federal budget, and eventually secured an appropriation.
Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, says the episode should never have progressed that far. Speaking on ARISE Television, he explained that the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation serves as the clearing house for federal agencies and maintains records of all legally recognised MDAs. According to him, any organisation claiming federal status ought to have been verified before its documents advanced through government channels. If proper due diligence had been carried out, he argued, a non-existent agency should never have reached the budget process.
Lawal also reportedly questioned how the alleged agency obtained a budget code and successfully navigated the appropriation process. He noted that every MDA is expected to prepare and defend its budget before the Budget Office, asking how an organisation without legal status could have been recognised as a legitimate government entity. He described the episode as evidence of “institutional compromise” and suggested the matter points to a wider network rather than an isolated administrative lapse.
The timeline raises further questions. Officials at the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission reportedly detected overlaps between the PFIPC’s activities and the commission’s statutory mandate in October 2025. On October 17, 2025, Gbajabiamila petitioned security agencies after disowning the appointment letter linked to the council. Yet, by December 2025, the proposed 2026 budget submitted to the National Assembly already contained the PFIPC’s allocation. On April 17, 2026, President Bola Tinubu signed the Appropriation Act into law with the allocation still intact. It was not until July 2026 that the controversy became public, prompting demands by the House of Representatives to carry out a separate investigation, while the President directed the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to investigate and report within 30 days.
The Senate, according to reports, has since distanced itself from the controversy, maintaining that lawmakers do not create budget lines or verify the legal status of agencies proposed by the Executive. That position has fuelled debate over where responsibility ultimately lies, with attention turning to the Budget Office, the Civil Service, the Office of the SGF, and the National Assembly’s committee system, all of which handled aspects of the process without detecting or stopping the alleged irregularity.
Beyond the controversy over one agency, the PFIPC affair has become a test of Nigeria’s public finance safeguards. If a disputed agency could reportedly secure office space, obtain a budget code, and receive a budget allocation without its legal status being conclusively established, governance experts say it exposes serious weaknesses in the country’s verification process. Restoring confidence, they argue, may require mandatory legal verification of every MDA before budget defence, stronger pre-appropriation checks within the Executive, and clearer accountability for officials responsible for each stage of the budget process. Until then, the PFIPC scandal will remain less a story about one forged document than about a system in which too many institutions assumed someone else had done the necessary checks.
Whether the ICPC investigation results in prosecutions or not, the PFIPC affair has already exposed a fundamental weakness in Nigeria’s public finance system: a budget can only be as credible as the institutions entrusted to verify it.