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 and 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 once they had located 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 verbalerequesting US visas for its "staff", and, most damning of all, aline 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.
