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There is something extremely irritating about the current national umbrage at Mr. Adeniyi Adeyemi and his now discredited Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council/Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PFIPC). The umbrage, to all intents and purposes, is largely feigned.
Let no one be deceived, Mr. Adeyemi was at home in the environment of President Bola Tinubu’s government until disagreement over sharing formula triggered off a tiff. Things went awry subsequently. The presidency had wanted Nigerians to swallow their single narrative that the Adeyemi scandal was the escapade of a lone con man. Nobody bought that. Nigerians knew it was not that simplistic. Mr. Adeyemi was, or perhaps, remains the chief executive of an agency commissioned at the highest level of government in the land, by hook or by crook.
The attempt to present Mr. Adeyemi’s purported swindle as an aberration is as deceitful as what the man is being accused of. He is a product of the Tinubu government’s ecosystem. Nigeria has degenerated within a short time into a fertile ground for institutional criminality and Nigerians cannot claim not to know what obtains around them. The truth is that Adeyemi is a criminal now because his scheme collapsed. He was either too greedy or someone else around him was.
When Femi Falana, the lawyer, declared last week that Nigeria has been exposed to unprecedented ridicule by the latest scandal in the Bola Tinubu presidency, referring to the PFIPC matter, he was simply romancing a non-existent reality. The truth is that Nigeria has been driven by its political leadership to a corner where there is no restraint from doing wrong. No compunction by leaders. And worse, no shame any more.
Adeyemi’s PFIPC matter was probably the scandal of the week. Last week. He did not drag the country to any nadir. Nigeria presents swims in opprobrium. Adeyemi, put succinctly, is no more than a conman in the midst of more accomplished conmen.
Atiku Abubakar, the politician and former vice president was, perhaps, more accurate in his perspective on the PFIPC scandal when he reportedly remarked that “The Tinubu presidency has dragged Nigeria to a place where scandals were no longer viewed as isolated incidents but recurring features of governance”.
Nigeria has sunk into a republic of sleaze in recent years, courtesy of a brazenly criminal political leadership and a citizenry that capitulated without any challenge. Nigeria is an awkward place and its people are awkwarder. Every abuse or expropriation of the people’s common patrimony occurs publicly, just like every threat to the country occurs in broad day light and escalates in the presence of the people. In Nigeria of this dispensation, it always comes down to narrow proclivities.
The Adeyemi scandal will definitely give way to a new scandal in a matter of days, if not hours. Actually, the International Monetary Fund has thrown up a new scandal already, which makes the N1.3billion appropriated for the supposed bogus PFIPC pale into insignificance. The exposure of the Tinubu government spending all of N8.8 trillion Naira outside Appropriation and without recourse to any accounting authority is, by any measure a scandal of monumental magnitude. It can only happen in Nigeria.
While the government is barely advancing any cogent explanation for the new scandal, the National Assembly and its leadership simply ducked, disappeared. Yet, this is the institution that ought to be in the forefront of the charge to get to the root of the monumental impropriety and abuse of accountability in public spending.
How can the National Assembly be interested in whatever anomaly the IMF has pointed out? The last thing that was heard of the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was its attempt to investigate N210 trillion of unaccounted revenue at the Nigeria National Petroleum Company (NNPC). That investigation remains enmeshed in allegations of conflict of interest in the Senate.
Neither the Committee of the Senate responsible for supervising the state oil company nor the senate in its entirety appears keen to proceed with the NNPC investigation. Interestingly, when a senator vocally demanded that the immediate past chief executive of the oil company be summoned to appear before the Senate, the Senate as a body repudiated any such action.
Meanwhile the NNPC which is synonymous with persistent failure to properly account for revenue collected for Nigerians, or for short paying its due into the federation account or of having stupendous amounts ‘missing’, continues its operations unhindered.
Long before Mr. Adeyemi and his PFIPC happened, in the early part of the Tinubu presidency, there had been one General Barry Ndiomu, appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari as Interim Administrator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP). Tinubu inherited Ndiomu still in acting capacity at PAP. The next thing Nigerians heard from General Ndiomu was an allegation that he paid some astounding sum to the Chief of Staff to be retained and confirmed in his station at PAP. The sum bandied around sounded like N500million. How and why anybody should pay such amount to serve his people is another matter.
Well, the said Gen. Ndiomu was replaced all the same. He made an Adeyemi type of noise and disappeared. Nigeria moved on. Neither the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) nor the Department of State Security (DSS) had time for such normal tales around the presidency. And that was that.
Or do you want to talk of the allegation of padding of the 2025 budget, flagged by Budgit, the budget accountability group? The figure involved in that scam was about N6.93 trillion. The amount was infused in the budget in the form of 11,122 projects by the National Assembly. These included 1,477 streetlights worth N393.29 billion, 538 boreholes worth N114.53 billion and ICT-related projects worth N505.79 billion, plus N6.76billion allocated to “empower traditional rulers”. Some Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) had their budget inflated by handsome amounts far beyond their respective requests. There was noise and Nigeria moved on, while President Tinubu’s reform continues. Even within the fold of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and their governors, stories of sleaze abound.
This is where Nigeria has found itself. Adeyemi is just one punction mark in a tedious story of reforms.
