Enitan Bello
Independently searched Nigeria’s budget documents from 2019 to the present. Here is what I found about the PFIPC scandal that nobody is talking about. The name did not come from nowhere.
Everyone is focused on Adeyemi the man. Nobody has gone back to ask where the name “Presidential Economic Advisory Council” actually came from. I did. And the answer changes this entire story.
The Presidential Economic Advisory Council is not a Tinubu creation. Tinubu’s economic body is called the Presidential Economic Coordination Council. He established it in March 2024, inaugurated it in July 2024, and chairs it himself alongside Dangote, Elumelu, the Senate President and the Governors Forum Chairman. It has a different name, a different structure and a different budget code.
The Presidential Economic Advisory Council is a creation of Buhari. Buhari established it in September 2019 to replace the Economic Management Team that Osinbajo was heading. It had real named members. Prof. Doyin Salami as chairman. Charles Soludo. Bismark Rewane. Eight economists reporting directly to the president with a defined mandate and a legal institutional identity.
When Tinubu came in and created the PECC in 2024, the Buhari-era PEAC was never formally dissolved. No gazette removing it. No Budget Office circular revoking its institutional identity. It simply went dormant. But dormant in Nigeria’s government system is not the same as deleted.
That dormant status is exactly what was exploited.
What the Budget Documents Actually Show
I searched the 2024 Appropriation Act. The Presidential Economic Advisory Council does not appear. Budget code 0111062001 is not there. I searched the 2025 Appropriation Act. The Presidential Economic Advisory Council does not appear. Budget code 0111062001 is not there either.
I checked the 2026 Appropriation Act, signed by President Tinubu on April 17, 2026. Budget code 0111062001 appears for the first time, on pages 50 and 51, listed as: “Presidential Economic Advisory Council / Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council”. Total allocation: N1,302,978,784. Personnel costs: N802,978,783, including N573 million in salaries. Overhead: N200,000,001. Capital: N300,000,000 under Research and Development.
The capital allocation is broken down into ten specific programme lines. N182.5 million for logistics for the World Investment Summit 2026. A Harvard Program on Negotiation. A Certified Investment Management Analyst course. A WTO trade negotiations course. Strategic investment management training. Negotiation and leadership courses.
This is not a vague placeholder. This is a detailed, populated budget submission with ten line items written in correct budget language by someone who knows how budget submissions are prepared.
This code was not carried forward by Buhari. It did not exist in 2024 or 2025. It was created fresh and inserted into the 2026 budget during the September to December 2025 preparation window. The same window in which Adeyemi was arrested in October 2025 and charged in November 2025.
The Borrowed Name and Why It Was Chosen
This is the dot nobody has connected publicly. Whoever inserted budget code 0111062001 did not invent the name “Presidential Economic Advisory Council” out of thin air. They borrowed it from a real Buhari-era body with an institutional history, former members, and a legitimate place in the record of government advisory structures. A budget reviewer seeing that name would not immediately flag it as suspicious. It sounds like something that exists. Because something by that name did exist. Under a previous president.
That is the specific function the Buhari-era PEAC served in this operation. Not as an active siphoning vehicle across multiple budget years. The evidence does not show that. What it shows is that its dormant name was used as camouflage for a fresh 2026 insertion. Familiar enough to pass review. Obscure enough that most reviewers would not immediately know whether it was still active under the current administration or not.
This is research, not forgery. Whoever did this knew enough about the history of Nigerian presidential advisory structures to identify a dormant body whose name could be reactivated without triggering immediate scrutiny. That knowledge does not exist in the general public. It exists within a specific group of people with institutional memory of how government advisory bodies are named, coded, and tracked within the Budget Office system.
And one more thing. The Presidency’s July 1 statement called both the PEAC and the PFIPC fictitious entities. But the PEAC was not technically fictitious. Adding PFIPC made it so. It was a real body of the Buhari administration. The name was real. The history was real. The exploitation of that history is what is new.
The Civil Servants and the OAGF Trail
Premium Times’ reporting, based on court documents, adds the most specific layer to this story, and it needs to be read carefully.
In April 2025, Adeyemi wrote to the Accountant General of the Federation on PFIPC letterhead, requesting the deployment of staff to fill five vacancies, including a Principal Accountant, Accountant I, Principal Auditor, Senior Auditor, and Auditor I. He also wrote a separate letter requesting the transfer of two named staff from the Office of the Chief Economic Adviser to the President.
The OAGF processed that request. On August 28, 2025, three senior civil servants were officially posted to the PFIPC. Their names are in court documents. Ojo Victor, 55, Assistant Chief Accountant. Omeh Amarachukwu, 40, internal auditor. Wakili Saidu, 45, audit department. Their posting letter was published on the OAGF’s own website.
They collected their letters and presented themselves to Adeyemi on September 1. He told them to resume on September 8. They did. They were shown to a shared open office. They were never given any assignments. Never given any documentation. Never briefed on any mandate.
Ojo Victor’s statement to police: “I have not been documented, and no schedule has been given to me since my assumption, which I find very strange.”
Wakili Saidu: “Since then, there has been no correspondence between me and the DG.”
Omeh Amarachukwu: “I only go to work once a week, the reason being that we have nothing to do since we were posted there.”
All three said independently that they had never heard of the agency before seeing their names in the posting letter. The OAGF processed a staff deployment request from a fake agency, published the posting letter on their own website, and sent three senior civil servants to sit in an empty office for weeks.
Nobody at the OAGF called the SGF’s office to ask if this agency was real before processing that request.
The Full Picture and the Questions That Remain
Let us put the confirmed timeline together. September 2019: Buhari creates the Presidential Economic Advisory Council with real members and a legal mandate.
March 2024: Tinubu creates the Presidential Economic Coordination Council, effectively superseding the PEAC. The PEAC is never formally dissolved.
April 2025: Adeyemi writes to the OAGF on PFIPC letterhead requesting civil servant deployments. The OAGF processes the request.
May 2025: Adeyemi meets Deputy Speaker Benjamin Kalu at the National Assembly. Voice of Nigeria, Vanguard and Punch cover it as a legitimate government engagement.
June 2025: Adeyemi receives a Chinese investment delegation and announces a Nigeria-China bilateral investment platform.
August 28, 2025: Three OAGF civil servants are officially posted to the PFIPC. Their posting letter appears on the OAGF website.
September 2025: Adeyemi visits EFCC Chairman Ola Olukoyede. A joint statement is issued. He also briefs NERC on the World Investment Summit.
September to December 2025: During the same budget preparation window, budget code 0111062001, titled Presidential Economic Advisory Council/Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, is included in the 2026 executive budget bill, with an allocation of N1.3 billion and ten specific programme lines.
October 10, 2025: Adeyemi hosts foreign ambassadors at Wells Carlton Hotel, Asokoro, without the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s knowledge. October 17, 2025: Chief of Staff petitions DSS and Police. October 22, 2025: Dolapo Babatunde Tanimola, the man Adeyemi says helped him procure the forged appointment letter, dies in a fire at Kachi Hotel in Utako. There is no independent news report of this fire. The only place it exists in the public record is inside the Presidency’s statement. October 27, 2025: Adeyemi is arrested. November 27, 2025: Eight-count charge filed at the Federal High Court. Two co-defendants identified only as Femi and Anu remain at large.
December 19, 2025: President Tinubu presents the 2026 Appropriation Bill to NASS. Budget code 0111062001 is already inside it. April 17, 2026: President Tinubu signs the 2026 Appropriation Act into law. Budget code 0111062001 with N1.3 billion survives every review stage. The questions that remain unanswered.
Who specifically submitted the budget proposal for code 0111062001 and through which MDA desk? Who at the OAGF approved the staff deployment request without verifying the agency’s legal existence? Who at the Federal Secretariat allocated office space without cross-checking the SGF’s register. Who at NITDA issued a .gov.ng domain to an unregistered agency. What the GIFMIS expenditure records show for code 0111062001 in 2026. Who Femi and Anu are and why their full names have not been published despite being co-defendants in an active federal case.
Adeyemi goes to court on July 27. That court process needs to answer all of the above, not just the eight counts against one man.
The borrowed name of a dormant Buhari-era body. A brand-new budget code created during the same months as the suspect’s prosecution. A key witness dead in a fire with no press coverage. Three civil servants sitting in an empty office. A .gov.ng domain nobody has explained. And a N1.3 billion budget line in a signed presidential document.
This is not the profile of a lone con artist with a forged letter.
• Bello writes from Lagos