PFIPC saga: Whither the National Assembly?

The current administration of President Bola Tinubu is presently reeling from a broadside salvo of a scandal that questions its handling of a phantom agency that, though not created by law, has been operating illegally and enjoys the official perquisites of office. The perquisites include the allocation to the agency an office space and equipment in the Federal Secretariat complex, Abuja, assignment of support staff, as well as inclusion in the 2026 federal government budget as a bona fide, budget-funded statutory agency, whereby it was allocated a whopping sum of N1.3 billion.

Added to the foregoing perquisites, its leadership enjoyed access to sensitive, top-level governance circles. That is the saga of the so-called Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Commission (PFIPC), which has been operating for some time under one Adeyemi Adeniyi Matthew, who had been parading himself as its director-general.

In the play-out of the saga, which came to light through red flag by Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu in a letter last year, courtesy of a protest by the extant Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC), arose an allegation by Adeyemi Adeniyi Matthew that his dud outfit came to be by a collaboration between him and the former, albeit through a proxy, and to whom he had paid the whopping sum of N400 million out of an earlier agreed bribe of N600 million, leaving an outstanding balance of N200 million.

Typical of such a high-brow scam, its tentacles have also linked George Akume, the Secretary to the Federal Government, from whom all appointments and placements of top public officers flow. Also in the tale are a complement of yet unnamed top government officials whose acts of commission and omission must have enabled the manifestation of the outrage of the PFIPC.

Meanwhile, as at the last count, the saga has attracted reactions from top-ranking quarters that accentuate its profundity as a high point in the daily degrading culture and processes of governance, as well as the rape of the common weal of the country.

In one vein are the reactions that indict top officials of the administration as complicit in the evil enterprise. In another vein are reactions that vindicate the chief of staff to the president as not complicit in the enterprise, as the culprit could as well be a lone wolf out to drop the name of Gbajabiamila for self-serving reasons.

However, topical among the reactions is the directive of the president to the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) to carry out a full investigation of the matter, pursuant to establishing who did what, when and how. This is even in yet another vein, the reaction that disqualifies the president from directing the ICPC to investigate the matter as such would amount to the Presidency probing itself.

Just as well, public concern is also trending over how the National Assembly is viewing the entire saga since by virtue of the inclusion of the PFIPC in the 2026 budget, the association of the saga with the institution cannot be overlooked as less significant. Rather, the circumstance calls for a more discretionary intervention by the institution in the interest of safeguarding its internal processes of exercising power over the nation’s purse from such outrageous development as the PFIPC in the future.

Given the constitutional oversight role of the National Assembly, while the inclusion of an illegal agency in the 2026   national budget constitutes a grave offence by the executive arm, its escape from the scrutiny of the National Assembly remains a major indictment of the institution as well, which even outweighs the slip by the executive arm. That is why the reported stance of the Senate to await the outcome of the investigation by the ICPC before taking action remains an abdication of responsibility by the institution.

By the extant provisions of the Nigerian constitution, responsibility for the integrity and health of the country’s fiscal processes is vested on the National Assembly based on the notion that whereas the operatives in the executive arm may falter in providing wholesome provisions in the budget, the legislature would serve as the gatekeeper to keep things in order. Hence, the present scenario of less-than-prompt commitment of the Senate to intervene constitutes a situation whereby the gatekeeper fails in its duty and provides room for the wolves to gain access and wreak havoc on the system.

In fact, taking a cue from the constitutional angle, along with the documented history of budget management and otherwise in the National Assembly, the association with and even inclusion of a fake PFIPC in the2026 budget provides enough justification for both chambers of the institution to adopt a more robust attitude towards auditing the internal processes of oversight of the various organs of the executive arm of government. To clarify from a personal angle, this author recalls vividly how during his days as the Director of Information and Publications in the National Assembly, he, with some subordinates, would go through the draft budget presented by the president to cross-match the entries with the schedule of MDAs, and even notify agencies whose entries were missing before printing the same for consideration by legislators.

Meanwhile, for recall, budget management by the National Assembly over the years has also not been without the annual rounds of rumours of illegal insertions by sundry interests in the name of ‘budget padding’. With the trending case of the PFIPC, the challenge of inserting unauthorised budget items may have been further heightened by the more brazen incidence of inclusion of illegal agencies in the budget.

The situation also raises the question of whether the PFIPC is the only agency so illegally inserted for budget funding, presently or even before. After all, this is Nigeria where snakes reportedly swallow public funds, and public officials in the custody of public funds store such largesse in toilet soak-away pits. In such a situation, the circumstance of the PFIPC fits into the format of high level guile.

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