***says agency was more interested in damage control than investigation

THE African Democratic Congress (ADC) has dismissed the ICPC’s interim report on the alleged fake Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) as predictable and inadequate, accusing the Federal Government of prioritising damage control over a thorough investigation.

In a statement signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the ADC said the report failed to explain how a fictitious agency allegedly secured federal office space, had civil servants deployed to it and found its way into the 2026 budget with a N1.3 billion provision, even as the investigation reportedly uncovered two other fictitious organisations linked to the principal suspect.

According to the opposition party, it’s review of the interim report of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) that have been made public regarding the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) and has realized that a shoddy job was carried out.

It would be recalled that when President Bola Tinubu directed the ICPC to undertake investigation into this case, ADC had waived it off, insisting instead on a full investigation by an independent panel.

“With the so-called interim report of the ICPC, our fears have come to pass as the report is not only predictable, it appears more concerned with exonerating government officials rather than providing clear answers to the serious questions that the scandal has raised.

“The ICPC report appeared to have given the impression that what happened was mere failure in government processes or procedures. “This position is difficult to sustain in the light of publicly available evidence, which establishes that this is not an error of omission or a mere glitch in the system. Instead, what happened was a grand scam that could have been possible only with the active connivance of government officials and institutions at the highest level.”

The party said the ICPC report also comes gravely short by suggesting that there could be accomplices within government, but mentioned none.

“Yet, an agency that was able to recommend only Adeyemi for prosecution on the basis of an investigation that the Commission itself has tagged as either on-going or inconclusive. If all that the commission had to present was a preliminary report, why not simply present it as confidential brief to the President instead of making a public drama of it in a manner that potentially prejudiced the overall investigation and cast Adeyemi as the principal culprit?

“What Nigerians expected was an investigation into how a “fictitious agency” managed to obtain all authorizations and institutional support required to operate as a legitimate government agency. Instead, what we are being offered, after weeks of so-called investigation is the same official narrative that the government had offered from the start: that what happened was a case of one clever impostor who, somehow, managed to outwit an entire government.

“Even as self-indicting as that would appear, the facts already in the public domain make such a conclusion difficult to sustain. What is clear is that the so-called PFIPC was not a creation of any Nigerian law or legitimate executive approval. Yet this same organisation managed to secured office space within the Federal Secretariat. If according to the ICPC report, Adeyemi had kicked down the door of the Secretariat office and allocated it to himself, did he also deploy the civil servants to himself, allocated a reported N1.3 billion to himself in the 2026 Appropriation Act, allocated official vehicles with customized number plates to himself and deployed armed security to himself? It is indeed impossible to answer yes to these questions and not conclude that this is the most incompetent and porous government in Nigeria’s history.”

ADC continued, “The ICPC has now reportedly uncovered two additional fictitious organisations linked to Mr. Adeyemi. If this were the case, it should ordinarily widen the investigation, not narrow its conclusion. If an investigation into one fake government agency leads investigators to two more, then the obvious question is no longer merely how one individual perpetrated an elaborate fraud. The question is how has this administration operated that made such systemic criminality possible?

“There is also the matter of the purported appointment letter bearing the signature of the Chief of Staff to the President, which investigators reportedly found to have been forged. But establishing that a signature was forged only answers how the deception may have started; it does not explain how it travelled that far. How did a forged document survive the verification procedures of government? Who verified the existence of PFIPC before civil servants were deployed to it? Who authorised its accommodation within a federal facility? Who processed its interactions with other government institutions? A forgery may explain the first door that was opened. It cannot explain why every subsequent door appears to have opened as well.

“Most troubling is the N1.3 billion provision in the 2026 federal budget. Budgetary provisions do not materialise by accident. They leave records, submissions, approvals and an audit trail. “The National Assembly has itself commenced an investigation into how PFIPC found its way into the federal budget. The ADC therefore expects the ICPC to tell Nigerians who proposed the allocation, who processed it, who verified the beneficiary agency and how a body that the Presidency now says never existed survived the scrutiny required to appear in an Appropriation Act. To prosecute Mr. Adeyemi without answering these questions would be to punish the man who entered through the window while refusing to ask who left the doors open. What has happened is a national disgrace in the full glare of the entire world. No serious government should be satisfied with identifying one culprit for prosecution.”

The ADC called for the immediate publication of the full ICPC interim report. “We also demand that every public official whose action or negligence enabled these entities to acquire official legitimacy must be named and held accountable where wrongdoing is established. Nigerians are not asking the government to manufacture culprits; they are asking it to follow the evidence wherever it may lead. Anything short of this, this so-called investigation, will remain what it presently appears to be: an exercise designed less to discover the truth than to contain the historic embarrassment.”