EMMANUEL PETER ADAYEHI
For days, Nigeria has been consumed by drama. A man, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, paraded himself as Director-General of something called the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, PFIPC. He allegedly paid ₦400 million through proxies to secure the appointment. He claimed there was a ₦24 billion take-off grant and that he refused a 48% kickback. He wrote to ministries and foreign embassies.
The Presidency has since disowned PFIPC, stating it “does not exist under this administration and no appointment has been made”. Police charged Adeyemi in November 2025 with forgery, impersonation and operating a fictitious agency. Opposition figures including the ADC and Atiku Abubakar have demanded an independent probe, asking how an entity the government now calls fake appeared to interface with state institutions.
It is a troubling spectacle. But while our attention was fixed on it, a far more disturbing revelation emerged quietly.
According to the International Monetary Fund’s latest Article IV Consultation, disclosed by IMF Resident Representative Christian Ebeke in Lagos on July 1, 2026, the Federal Government failed to capture public expenditure equivalent to about 2% of GDP in recent budgets.
Pause on that figure.
Using the National Bureau of Statistics’ 2025 nominal GDP of ₦441.5 trillion, 2% equals roughly ₦8.83 trillion. That is about $6.15 billion.
This is not an accounting error. This is not loose change. This is money spent outside the budget framework that Nigerians debate every year in the National Assembly. Ebeke explained the omission was “linked in part to large government projects executed outside the formal budget process”. The result: Nigeria’s fiscal deficit looks smaller than its actual borrowing needs.
Let that sink in. ₦8.83 trillion.
That amount could build and equip primary healthcare centers in every LGA. It could clear years of ASUU arrears, expand power transmission, fix federal roads, and fund agricultural value chains. Instead, it moved outside the appropriation law — without line-item scrutiny, without public debate, without the checks the Constitution demands.
Two kinds of opacity
The PFIPC case represents one kind of opacity: the kind you can see. An alleged fake agency somehow secured a ₦1.302 billion allocation in the 2026 Appropriation Act — ₦802.98m for personnel, ₦200m overhead, ₦300m capital. Critics have asked how a “non-existent” body got budget lines and administrative approvals. The Presidency maintains PFIPC was never lawfully created.
The IMF finding represents the second kind: systemic opacity. When expenditure is executed outside the budget, it bypasses the legislature, the Auditor-General, and public procurement rules. The IMF warned this “raises concerns about procurement processes and oversight” and complicates coordination between fiscal and monetary authorities.
Both point to the same governance failure. When rules are bypassed, money becomes untraceable. Whether it is fraudsters exploiting weak vetting, or real projects funded outside the Appropriation Act, the outcome for citizens is the same: services collapse while debt rises.
The cost to ordinary Nigerians
For years, citizens have been told to endure hardship because “government coffers are empty.” Families have watched purchasing power evaporate. Businesses have closed. Parents now choose between school fees and food.
Yet we now know that enormous public expenditures have existed outside the very budget we are asked to sacrifice for. That contradiction cannot stand.
Democracy cannot survive on blind trust. Accountability is the price public officials pay for managing public resources.
Four questions Nigerians deserve answers to
1. Who approves this volume of off-budget spending? Section 80 of the Constitution is clear: all government revenue must go into the Consolidated Revenue Fund and be spent only as appropriated by the National Assembly.
2. Who executes it? The IMF linked it to “large government projects.” Nigerians deserve a published list of those projects, contractors, and locations.
3. Who monitors it? The Budget Office and Ministry of Finance must explain how capital spending left the budget documents.
4. Who audits it? The Office of the Auditor-General should conduct a special audit and table it before the Public Accounts Committees within 90 days.
The IMF itself said these expenditures “should be reported and should be recorded, so that this statistical discrepancy will disappear”. Authorities have indicated plans to revise budget laws to capture such spending. That must happen urgently, and with penalties.
Conclusion: Normalize transparency, not scandal
The tragedy is not only that trillions may have escaped public scrutiny. The tragedy is that we have become so accustomed to scandal that outrage now lasts a few hours before the next headline.
We must not normalize this.
Whether you support this administration or oppose it, one principle should unite us: every kobo of public money must be traceable, lawful, and accountable.
Nigeria does not have only a revenue problem. We have a governance problem. And until transparency becomes non-negotiable, ordinary citizens will continue to pay for a system that refuses to account for itself.
Start with two actions: an independent forensic probe into how PFIPC got into budget documents, and immediate legislation that criminalizes off-budget spending above a threshold and mandates quarterly publication.
Because the real ghost is not an agency with a fake letterhead. The real ghost is ₦8.8 trillion moving in the dark.