By Nnamdi Prince
Last Tuesday, hours after a Federal High Court judge in Abuja issued a bench warrant for his arrest, police tracked down Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew in a village hideout in Osun state.
They brought him back to the capital in handcuffs. The speed of the operation was striking. For months, Adeyemi, the self-styled director-general of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), a body the presidency insists never lawfully existed, had eluded a manhunt he says was really an attempt to silence him. It took security operatives days to locate him. It took them hours once a court finally ordered it.
That contrast, small as it seems, has become the lens through which many Nigerians are now reading the entire affair.
On paper, the PFIPC scandal is almost too strange to be real: a phantom government agency, complete with a Federal Secretariat office, dozens of bank accounts, a note verbale requesting US visas for its “staff”, and, most damning of all, a line item worth roughly 1.3 billion naira in the country’s 2026 national budget.
The presidency says the whole thing was the work of a serial fraudster who forged a presidential appointment letter and the signature of Femi Gbajabiamila, the president’s powerful chief of staff. Adeyemi, for his part, insists his appointment was genuine, that he paid 400 million naira to secure it, and that senior officials tried to seize control of the council’s finances once money started moving.
Both cannot be true. But the manner in which the state has handled the fallout matters just as much as which version is correct, and it is that handling which now deserves scrutiny.
Consider the sequence. President Bola Tinubu publicly directed the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission to investigate the scandal, including how a fictitious council came to be written into a national budget and who inside government enabled it.
Yet the loudest and fastest institutional response has not been that inquiry; it has been the presidency’s rapid, categorical dismissal of Adeyemi’s allegations against Gbajabiamila, and the swiftness with which police finally moved once a court, not the executive, forced their hand. For a government that says it wants the truth, the urgency has so far been reserved for closing the story down rather than opening it up.
Then there is the death of Dolapo Babatunde Tanimola, an associate Adeyemi describes as a key intermediary in his dealings with government officials. Police say Tanimola died in a hotel fire in Abuja days before Adeyemi’s original arrest, and that they confirmed his body at the morgue.
Adeyemi says no independent witness or media report ever documented a fire at that hotel, and that the building was later demolished by unidentified men. Whatever the truth of it, the death of a central witness in a scandal implicating the chief of staff to the president is precisely the kind of event that ought to prompt a rigorous, independent, and transparent inquiry, not a footnote in a police report.
None of this makes Adeyemi a sympathetic figure. He has, by his own admission and by public record, a history that predates PFIPC: in 2016, he presented himself as a UN-affiliated ambassador for a body that turned out not to exist either. A man does not need to be innocent, however, to be entitled to a fair trial.
That is the point that is at risk of being lost. Nigeria’s constitution, like international human rights law, does not make the presumption of innocence conditional on a defendant’s character or on the political sensitivity of the people he has accused. It applies precisely in the cases where applying it is inconvenient.
And this case is deeply inconvenient for the Nigerian state. If Adeyemi is lying, the government needs an investigation robust enough to prove it beyond the reach of doubt. If he is telling even part of the truth, Nigeria needs to know how a non-existent agency acquired office space in the seat of government, opened accounts with the central bank, and made it, fully funded, into a national budget passed by the legislature, without a single official raising the alarm before it became a public scandal.
Either way, the public interest is served only by an inquiry that is visibly independent of the officials whose conduct is in question. Adeyemi himself has called for exactly that: a panel including civil society, the bar association, and international observers, rather than an anti-corruption agency that answers to the same executive branch implicated in the allegations. It is a reasonable request, and one increasingly hard to refuse without feeding the very suspicion the government says it wants to dispel.
Nigeria has been here before. Scandals that begin as bizarre curiosities- a ghost worker, a phantom contract, a fictitious agency- have a way of revealing how thin the walls are between the machinery of state and the individuals who are meant to be its custodians. What determines whether such moments become turning points or merely footnotes is not the strangeness of the scandal itself, but whether the institutions responsible for accountability are allowed to function independently of the people they are investigating.
For the Nigerian public as well as international partners, increasingly attentive to where its votes, aid, trade and diplomatic capital are invested, the PFIPC affair is a useful test case. It asks a simple question of the Tinubu government: is due process something to be honoured only when it is politically costless? The answer will be found not in the government’s statements, but in whether Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, con artist or whistleblower, or perhaps something of both, is given a trial that Nigerians, and the world, can actually trust.
Nnamdi Prince writes from Lagos.
