The Menace Of Fake Agencies

REUBEN ABATI

Ghosts. Fake, Fraudulent, Dubious Things are not new in Nigeria. The crisis of transparency in Nigeria’s public sector payroll system began, for example, as far back as the 70s, and became even more problematic in the 80s, with the expansion of the public service, and the reliance on cash and paper records for payment of civil servants. The records were poorly kept, cash was paid physically by many government agencies, and this made it easy for unscrupulous officials to insert fake names into the list. With the creation of additional Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government, and in the absence of computerization, and a central data base for workers and payments, ghost workers found their way into the payroll. At both the Federal and state levels, non-existent persons collected salaries that they never worked for, but of course the beneficiaries were the corrupt government officials who created the ghosts in the first place. When people retired or died, there was no oversight system to clean up the books. This ghost phenomenon would soon become a scandal with the discovery of wastages and leakages running into billions siphoned out of state coffers. There were just as many ghosts as there were living persons working for the Nigerian government. 

It was not until after military rule, that a more conscientious effort started being made to drive “ghosts” out of the payroll. In 2007, the Yar’Adua administration introduced the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) to centralize the payroll system and shut out the ghosts. By 2014, about 60,000 ghosts were weeded out of the Federal payroll. The figures were higher at state levels. The fraud was not limited to the payroll alone, the pensions payroll was also affected. Some civil servants in fact collected more than two salaries in a month, using false identities. By 2010, there was a more concerted effort to computerize the payments system, an approach that was strongly resisted from within and outside the system. Subsequent administrations introduced biometric identification. This background is essential simply as a reminder that the culture of falsehood, ghosts, fakery and falsehood is long-established in the Nigerian public system but no one could ever have imagined that a day would arrive when not just human beings, that is personnel, would be non-existent, yet maintained, at a high cost to the state, but whole Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), will start operating in the open, and yet be as fake as the emergent AI imageries of today. The “ghosts” have assumed human form, and they are so bold that they are insisting on their rights even at the highest level.

It is a scandal. It is an embarrassment. Nigeria is having to pay a heavy price for its lack of regard for data, documentation, memory, record-keeping, and its ugly reliance on ad-hoc-sim. Alas, the country’s Presidency, the highest decision-making body in the country (!), has fake agencies and departments. The government of Nigeria does not have a proper record of the various departments that serve it. And so, one after the other, Nigeria discovers fake agencies, fake departments, fake staff, fake appointees, working in real settings, using real resources, all in a surreal context. The latest in the series of scandals coming to light is the most recent announcement, last Friday, by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), Dr. Musa Adamu Aliyu, SAN that yet another fake federal government agency has been uncovered.  The fake agency is called “National Brands Development and Made in Nigeria Special Project Office”. It is allegedly promoted by one Prince George Buchi Nwabueze, with the “suspected active collaboration of senior public servants in the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation”. Prince Nwabueze is said to operate under four variants of his name. We are not dealing with one name, but four, identifying one person! Dr. Aliyu SAN had gone to the Villa to brief the President and right there, after seeing the President, he told the Press that the President had ordered the arrest of the said Nwabueze, as well as the immediate suspension of three Permanent Secretaries in the Office of the SGF namely: M. S. Danjuma, Engr. Nandungu Gagare and Richard Pheelangawa.

From the very beginning, this matter has been wrongly handled. It is not the job of the ICPC Chairman to speak on behalf of the President within the premises of the Villa, and announce Executive decisions about arrest and suspension of Federal Permanent Secretaries. There are standard procedures for addressing misconduct on the part of civil servants. The Perm Secs, being serving officers of the state, should have been queried by the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, acting on the directive of the President, to get their responses to the allegation of being facilitators of a fake agency within the system, and it is on that basis that action can be taken. But the ICPC chief was the complainant, and he was the same person who came out to convey the orders of the President. There is often a confusion of roles and responsibilities under this administration and that is why things get mixed up. Now, Prince Nwabueze has kicked back on LinkedIn, (imagine a supposed government appointee responding to the Nigerian government on social media!) with an appointment letter dated October 3, 2025, which grants him a renewable five-year term as National Coordinator and Executive Director of the same agency which ICPC dismisses as fake. The said letter even assigns an office to his agency: “Room B53, Ground Floor, within the OSGF Complex”. He added further that the agency has been under the OSGF for 16 years, since July 2010. So, what kind of investigation did the ICPC conduct before rushing a report to the President?

It has also been disclosed by Prince Nwabueze that his agency has a National Network with Assistant Coordinators in 20, if not all states of the Federation.  It is also put on record that the Made in Nigeria agency had organized a Stakeholders Engagement event in Nasarawa state which was hosted by Governor Abdullahi Sule, with plans to establish a National Brand Processing and Packaging Centre in Nasarawa State.  It has also organized economic forums and trade exhibitions in different parts of the world. Meanwhile, the ICPC insists that the agency has no Presidential authorization, and that there is no law establishing it. Questions: So, who has been funding it for 16 years? How come it operates under the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the same office that keeps government records? And the agency does not exist in law? There is a lot more that the ICPC needs to find out and tell us. Otherwise, we will be tempted to take Prince Nwabueze more seriously, when he, the accused, retorted as follows: “Made in Nigeria Special Project Office is a project office in the OSGF. We don’t know where fake agency comes from. A programme has been in the SGF’s office since 16 July 2010 was just discovered yesterday (Friday) after 16 years. Nigeria is a funny country.”

But we don’t think this is funny at all, coming against the background of the previous unmasking of another fake agency, the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), promoted by one Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew. There must be something about fake agencies in Nigeria and Princes.  First, we had Prince Adeyemi, now Prince Nwabueze – where will the next Prince of fake come from, probably somewhere in the North to complete the picture of how fake representations also obey the Federal Character rule in Nigeria. Like Prince Nwabueze, Prince Adeyemi also made sordid claims that involved the Presidency and the OSGF about the legitimacy of the PFIPC, and the genuineness of his appointment. Adeyemi is said to be in police custody, but he has also confronted the Nigerian government with remarkable boldness. His lawyers have announced that their client does not want to be interrogated discreetly either by the House of Representatives or any other government agency.  He wants an open, public hearing to defend all the allegations against him: how he got his appointment letter, physical office space in the Federal Secretariat, an insertion into pages 50 and 51 of the 2026 National Appropriation Act with an allocation of N1.3 billion, and CBN budget codes. Like the Made in Nigeria agency, the PFIPC is said not to have any legal backing. To worsen matters, the ICPC in the course of its investigations further uncovered two additional fictitious agencies associated with the PFIPC namely the FCT Investment Promotion Agency (FIPA) and the Foreign Investment Promotion Agency and Public-Private Partnership (FIPA-PPP). In total, the ICPC has identified four fake agencies, so far, operating publicly, with no formal authorization, using the name of the Presidency and the Nigerian Government in vain. There is also the scandal of the Presidential Implementation Committee on the Alienation of Federal Government Properties which was created by the Obasanjo administration in 2000 to manage the privatization, sale and lease of federal government assets. This particular agency was dissolved by President Tinubu on November 5, 2025 but it has remained in operation ever since with a serving Secretary who again is linked with the OSGF, and has stubbornly refused to stop acting on behalf of the Federal Government. And by the way, since Prince Adeyemi’s lawyers insisted that he would rather exercise his Constitutional right to speak publicly, we have not heard a word again about his matter. The authorities have surprisingly gone quiet.  No. This is one case that must not be swept under the carpet!

This on-going menace of fake agencies is a comment on the quality of Nigeria’s governance process. Who keeps records for the Nigerian government? If there is this level of incompetence, forgetfulness and sloppiness at the Federal level, imagine what chaos there would be at the sub-national levels, where the governance structures and oversight mechanisms are weaker. Every governance cycle, that is transition from one administration to another, there is the usual elaborate, handover ceremony of notes and meetings of personnel. What exactly do they hand over? Who studies the notes? The handover ritual is to ensure a smooth transition and to provide an incoming administration a clear picture of the state of things. But obviously that does not serve the intended purpose because of a gap in Nigeria’s governance process: the tendency to focus more on form rather than substance, atmosphere and ceremony rather than processes, title, power and privileges instead of responsibility. With regard to the structure of government, there was once an Oronsaye Report (2012) under the Jonathan administration which recommended the restructuring and rationalization of Federal government agencies, parastatals and commissions, involving the merger, and/or scrapping of agencies with duplicated functions. The Buhari administration adopted the Report in August 2022 but did nothing. In 2024, the Tinubu administration also adopted the Report and even set up an eight-man review committee on it and two years later, it has also done nothing. For an administration that claims to be reform-minded, this is a crying shame and more so, as it now presides over the mushrooming of fake agencies, now the pastime of Nigerian Princes. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has now ordered a forensic audit and investigation of MDAs under his watch. This is more than three years after he assumed office as President. That audit is three years late, the timing is misplaced. It is the entire government machinery that is in need of an overhaul.  Political leaders also need a mental reset about the original purpose of governance.

The damage is already done because investors, foreign institutions, diplomats, even ordinary persons now have every reason to doubt the bureaucratic capacity and the organizational skills of those who run the Nigerian government, beginning with the civil service establishment and extending to the political power elite that seems to be dangerously inattentive. Why should anyone hereafter trust any claim made by a Nigerian official? Where is that department of government where simple details can be verified when a sitting Head of the Civil Service publicly confessed that her office failed and yet she was feted and celebrated on her retirement? Who is responsible for verifying the existence of government bodies? Where did the institutional checks fail? How do fake government agencies gain legitimacy? Nigeria cannot continue to reward inefficiency and negligence and expect to be respected by other countries of the world. Politicians come and go, but countries with strong civil service operations and systems (UK, Canada, Singapore, United States, Australia) often score high in terms of public administration efficiency, policy delivery, risk management and structural organization. Nigeria is running a rickety public service system that continues to cause embarrassment. Th real danger is not that someone can fake government. It is that the fake can become convincing enough to pass through government itself. How to fix this should be one of the major issues for conversation in the 2027 electoral process.