That is the part of this story that keeps getting quietly filed away while the investigation trains its lens on Adeyemi alone.
There is a peculiar comfort that Nigerian power structures take in finding a single villain. It happened with the fake arms contracts of the Dasuki years, and it is happening again with the extraordinary case of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, a government agency that did not exist, run from an office inside the seat of the presidency, that came within reach of nearly a billion naira in public funds before anyone in authority appears to have asked the most basic question: does this thing actually exist?
The official story, as it has been told to Nigerians so far, is reassuringly simple. A man named Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew invented an agency, forged a letter of appointment, occupied office space inside the Federal Secretariat, opened accounts with the Central Bank, and nearly walked away with public money. He is now the subject of a criminal case and a police manhunt, accused of forgery and impersonation. The presidency has called him a con artist. Case, apparently, closed.
Except it isn't, and shouldn't be. Because the document at the centre of this affair was not just any letter. It was a letter purportedly bearing the signature of Femi Gbajabiamila, the president's chief of staff, arguably the second most powerful office in the Nigerian state. Adeyemi has publicly said he was given that appointment by Gbajabiamila's office. Gbajabiamilasays he has never met the man. Somewhere between those two claims sits a scandal that is not really about a con artist at all. It is about how a fabricated document, if that is indeed what it was, moved through the machinery of Nigeria's presidency with enough apparent authority to secure office space, bank accounts and a budget line, without a single senior official stopping to check it.
