The ghost that walked among us

If you think Nigerian governance has reached peak absurdity, hold onto your jallabiya—because a ghost recently obtained office accommodation… in the Federal Secretariat no less, opened accounts with the Central Bank of Nigeria, and nearly walked away with $950,000 of public funds. And you can’t even charge a ghost with fraud.

The saga of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), a phony presidential parastatal, is perhaps the most poetic metaphor for the Nigerian condition in 2026. Here is a nation grappling with genuine crises: inflation at 33.69 per cent, a power crisis that feels like government policy, and a youth unemployment situation so dire that the streets have become the primary employer. Yet somehow, the most pressing distraction is the brazen audacity of one man and the staggering gullibility of an entire system.

This is not a story; it is a feature film waiting to happen. One Mallam Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew walked into the halls of power, presented forged documents signed by fake officials, and—voila—the PFIPC was born! He secured office space at the Federal Secretariat, opened accounts at the CBN, and even appeared in the 2026 Appropriation Act with a juicy allocation of N1.3 billion. The man didn’t just dream big, he dreamed in national budget format.

But if you think a story about a fake agency is comical, wait for the plot twist: he allegedly paid N400 million in bribes to secure his “appointment.” This means someone was paid to “facilitate” the creation of a fake agency by someone who didn’t have the authority to create it. That’s like paying a toll to cross a bridge that doesn’t exist, and the toll collector is also imaginary.

One cannot help but marvel at the audacity. This is a man who, with forged documents and sheer confidence, walked past security, greeted directors, and convinced everyone that he was legit. In a country where obtaining a passport requires seven forms and two years of patience, this gentleman simply willed an entire government agency into existence. If confidence were currency, he would have balanced the national budget single-handedly.

Let’s be honest: this scandal is not an anomaly. It is tradition with an ID card. As recent history shows, we have leaders who commission uncompleted projects, budgets with N6.93 trillion in phantom projects inserted by the National Assembly, and former governors who let N30 billion relief funds sit in a vault while victims suffer.

Consider the power sector, where despite spending over N11 trillion since privatisation, the national grid collapses every Tuesday. Consider the education sector, where teachers go on strike so often that students have become professors at home. Consider the health sector, where doctors emigrate in droves, leaving behind a system that operates on prayer and paracetamol. In this environment, a fake agency with real bank accounts is not an outlier, it is a natural evolution.

The PFIPC scandal also mirrors the ongoing fuel subsidy controversy, where the government claims subsidies have ended but Nigerians keep paying higher prices. Or the foreign exchange crisis, where the naira’s value depends on which window you check, what day it is, and which deity you pray to. The common thread is simple: opacity breeds opportunity, and opportunity, when married to desperation, produces the kind of creativity that should be studied in business schools—if only it weren’t entirely illegal.

Meanwhile, the PFIPC scandal has provoked more outrage than the fact that we are borrowing N8.8 trillion to service debt that leaves most Nigerians behind. Or that the average graduate must become a logistics entrepreneur because the formal sector cannot absorb them. Or that insecurity has become so normalised that we now rate states by how many people they have lost to banditry. We clutch our pearls over a fake agency but yawn at the collapse of the real ones.

This is the heart of the matter: the PFIPC scandal is not a story of one man’s audacity. It is a story of a system so broken that a fake agency with forged documents can pass through multiple layers of government approval—from the Office of the Secretary to the Government to the Federal Ministry of Finance to the National Assembly. It is a story of institutions so compromised that the line between reality and fiction is blurred by the absence of accountability.

In a perverse way, the PFIPC scandal reveals our collective complicity. We love the “smart” man who beats the system. We celebrate the “hustler” who finds a shortcut. We applaud the politician who invests in stomach infrastructure during elections, ignoring that the money invested was stolen from our collective future. This is the culture that made the PFIPC possible—a culture where the ends justify the means, where process is an inconvenience, and where integrity is for people who cannot afford to be otherwise.

But consider this: the same audacity that Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew displayed could have been channeled into something productive. Imagine if he had walked into the Federal Secretariat with forged documents to establish a fake agency for actually solving the power crisis or creating jobs for unemployed youth. That would have been so ridiculous that perhaps—just perhaps—someone might have stopped to ask questions.

But in true Nigerian fashion, we must laugh to keep from crying. This scandal has exposed the loopholes in our system, the absence of proper verification, the ease of access, the willingness to believe without evidence. As President Tinubu has rightly directed a thorough investigation, the silver lining is that a ghost may have just revealed the cracks in our foundation. The question is whether we will repair them or simply pave over them with more bureaucratic cement.

The EFCC, the ICPC, and the National Assembly must now prove that they are more than ceremonial bodies. They must demonstrate that they can follow the money trail, not just in the PFIPC case but in every case where public funds have been diverted. If they do, this scandal might actually serve a purpose beyond entertainment.

The rest of the continent may be cheering our football defeats or shaking their heads at our governance scandals, but this is not about them. It is about a nation that must decide whether it wants to be a functioning state or a comedy of errors. The choice is ours—but we must stop applauding the “sharp” man who made it to the other side with his loot and start demanding integrity from the system.

Because if we don’t, the next ghost agency won’t just walk among us and steal money… it will steal our future. And by then, the only office we will be securing is a spot in the queue for the next palliatives, waiting for the government to remember that we exist. The PFIPC was fake, but the consequences of our indifference are painfully real.

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