Notwithstanding its nebulous status, the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) was able to appoint a director-general and hundreds of staff. It also secured an office space at the federal secretariat and indeed found its way into the nation’s budget with a Budget Code 0111062001 assigned to it. This huge achievement was attained by the presence in Nigeria of too many fake tendencies that can easily be put into use by some smart citizens. Although many citizens are baffled by stories of what the fake agency had done before an alarm was raised, one can conclude that many such bodies exist in our clime and that except concrete steps are taken to curtail the tendencies which give them oxygen, many more of such 419 institutions and entities will soon spring up and operate seamlessly in all the 3 arms of government.
The trend has always been with us especially in the area of manipulated payroll lists leading to many ghost workers earning huge salaries every month at all levels of government. It was even more prominent at the local government level with audit reports recording thousands of ghost workers making it difficult for any meaningful development to occur at the grassroots. At the federal level, a higher degree of audacity wrapped in negligence emerged from 2015 during the tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari. At the time, it became fashionable for government to release names of appointees to boards of public agencies featuring many dead members. It was generally believed that names of many of the appointees were inserted into the list without the knowledge of the then president. In the case of the present administration, what looks like many illegal appointments have had to be reversed.
