By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
Let it be recorded, for the history books that future Nigerians will read while shaking their heads in disbelief, that in the year of our Lord 2026, under the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a government agency achieved something no philosopher has managed in three thousand years of human thought: it proved you can simultaneously exist and not exist, depending entirely on who is asking and what they’re asking about.
Let’s call it, with appropriate reverence, The Schrödinger Council.
On the 11th of June, 2026, from the marbled corridors of the State House, Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila, a man who once commanded the House of Representatives with gavel and gravitas, issued a disclaimer so emphatic, so unflinching, you would think he was disowning a distant cousin who’d embarrassed the family at a wedding. “Such an office does not exist,” he declared, advising foreign missions, multilateral institutions, and security agencies worldwide to disregard any correspondence from the so called Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council.
One can almost hear the foreign ambassadors adjusting their monocles. “You mean to tell us, Your Excellency’s office, that an agency with a name longer than most company mission statements simply doesn’t exist?”
And yet, in a plot twist worthy of Nollywood’s finest screenwriters, a curious soul went digging through the 2026 Appropriation Act and found, nestled comfortably under the Presidency’s own budget heading, a line item of ₦1,302,978,784. One point three billion naira. Allocated to the Presidential Economic Advisory Council/Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council. In black and white. Passed by the National Assembly. Signed, presumably, by people whose job is to read these things.
So somewhere between the Budget Office drafting the document, the National Assembly debating it clause by clause in their usual theatre of seriousness, and the President assenting to it, a ghost agency picked up a billion naira allowance. Either Nigeria’s budgeting process has achieved supernatural sophistication, capable of funding entities from the spirit realm, or somebody is being economical with the truth, and not in the way the budget itself was meant to be.
Meanwhile, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi, the gentleman at the center of this melodrama, held his own press conference in Abuja and dropped details with the calm confidence of a man who has receipts and intends to use them. He said the council maintained active accounts with the Central Bank of Nigeria. He said it occupied office space at the Federal Secretariat, presumably real office space, with real chairs, possibly real air conditioning, the kind of luxuries unavailable to ghosts. He said the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation approved more than 300 staff appointments.
Three hundred staff. Let that marinate. Somewhere in Abuja, there may be three hundred Nigerians who went through interviews, signed appointment letters, perhaps even resigned from previous jobs, to join an agency the Chief of Staff insists never drew breath. Are they still showing up to an office that, according to the Villa, is make believe? Do they clock in every morning to a building that officially doesn’t exist, like extras in a government funded production of The Emperor’s New Agency?
It would be the funniest thing to happen to Nigerian bureaucracy since the last time a federal agency was caught budgeting for furniture nobody could locate, except this time, the punchline comes with an alleged ₦600 million price tag, paid, Adeyemi says, in installments: ₦400 million upfront, ₦200 million still owed, like some perverse layaway plan for public office.
And then there’s the matter of the 48 percent. Not 40, not 50, forty eight. A number so specific it suggests careful negotiation, perhaps even a spreadsheet, perhaps even, dare we imagine, a PowerPoint presentation somewhere titled “Optimal Extraction Percentage for ₦24 Billion Take Off Grant: A Strategic Framework.” One almost respects the precision. Almost.
This is the Tinubu administration in miniature: a government that tightened belts on petrol subsidies with surgical ruthlessness, that lectures Nigerians nightly on the gospel of fiscal discipline and “renewed hope,” while apparently unable to account for how a billion naira agency slipped into its own budget without anyone noticing, or, more damning still, while everyone noticed and said nothing.
Picture the irony for a moment. Ordinary Nigerians queue for hours at fuel stations, watch transport fares double, watch garri prices climb like a man scaling Olumo Rock, all in the name of “necessary sacrifice” for the nation’s fiscal health. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Presidency’s own budget, a billion naira line item for an agency nobody can confirm exists floats along peacefully, undisturbed, unquestioned, the one part of the federal budget, it seems, that everybody agreed not to scrutinize too closely.
Adeyemi, for his part, is not backing down quietly into the night. He has called for an independent panel, not a press statement, not another disclaimer, but an actual investigation, to examine the budget references, question the relevant officials, and publish findings for all Nigerians to see. He has even raised the death of an alleged intermediary, Babatunde Tanimola, and claimed attempts on his own life, dragging this from administrative farce into something altogether graver.
Because here is where the satire stops and the seriousness must begin. You cannot mock a budget line that funded 300 real salaries, if those salaries were real. You cannot laugh away a man’s claim that someone died over this, if that claim has any substance. The comedy of “ghost agencies” curdles fast into tragedy when actual Nigerians, actual families, actual livelihoods, are caught in the machinery.
So let the Presidency choose its posture carefully. It cannot simultaneously declare an agency fictional and explain away its billion naira budget line, its 300 staff, its CBN accounts, as mere coincidence or paperwork error. Nigeria has had quite enough “clerical errors” that happen to be worth a billion naira.
Produce the appointment letter. Produce the payroll records. Produce the CBN statements. Produce the budget defence documents showing exactly who inserted this council into the Appropriation Act, and why no lawmaker thought to ask a single question before passing it.
Because right now, the only thing more remarkable than a ghost agency with a billion naira budget is a government that expects Nigerians to laugh this off as just another Monday in Abuja.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
28th June, 2026
