Nigerian Concord Newspaper
The Secretary of the Ondo State chapter of African Democratic Congress, ADC, Ambassador Kunle Adeloye has berated what he described as hurried arrest of Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi, the embattled Director-General of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC).
Adeloye made this condemnation in a press statement he signed and made available to journalists yesterday.
The statement reads:
The hurried arrest of Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi, the embattled Director-General of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), and the parallel ICPC investigation ordered by the Federal Government, reek of a carefully orchestrated political smokescreen. What we are witnessing is not the decisive action of a government determined to root out fraud; it is a desperate attempt to isolate one man, bury deeper institutional rot, and protect powerful interests within the corridors of power.
Let us be clear. The PFIPC did not spring from thin air. It operated from the Federal Secretariat in Abuja. It secured office space. It obtained domain approval. It opened accounts with the Central Bank of Nigeria. Civil servants were posted to it. And, most damning of all, it found its way into the 2026 Appropriation Act with a N1.3 billion allocation. These are not the achievements of a lone “con artist” operating in the shadows. They required the active or passive complicity of multiple government agencies and officials.
Yet the Presidency’s response has been to declare the entire structure a fiction, pin everything on Adeyemi’s alleged forgery of an appointment letter bearing the signature of the Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, and then rush to court and the ICPC.
President Tinubu’s public expression of “100% confidence” in Gbajabiamila, even while ordering an investigation that must examine “the role of any public officer,” only deepens the suspicion. When the principal witness in the case against Adeyemi is simultaneously shielded by presidential endorsement, the investigation begins to look less like justice and more like damage control.
Adeyemi has made serious counter-allegations: that senior officials demanded money to facilitate his appointment, that N400 million changed hands, and that attempts were later made to seize the council’s funds. Whether these claims are true or not is for a court to determine. What cannot be dismissed is that the government has shown far greater urgency in neutralising Adeyemi, including the questionable detention of his elderly father than in explaining how a phantom agency sailed through bureaucratic and budgetary processes.
The selective targeting of the weakest link while the system that enabled him remains largely unexamined is the classic hallmark of a cover-up.
Nigerians have seen this script before. When scandals threaten the inner circle, the response is often to find a scapegoat, accelerate his prosecution, and declare the matter closed. The PFIPC affair risks becoming yet another chapter in that familiar book. The real questions are, who authorised the office allocation, who approved the CBN accounts, who inserted the budget line, and who looked the other way for months, are being drowned out by the noise of one man’s arrest.
True accountability would require an independent, transparent probe that follows the money and the paper trail wherever they lead, without sacred cows. Until that happens, the arrest of Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi and the ICPC’s 30-day assignment will be remembered not as the beginning of justice, but as a deliberate plot by the Federal Government to smokescreen a scandal that reaches far higher than one embattled “Director-General.”
The Nigerian people deserve better than another carefully managed distraction.
*— Ambassador ’Kunle Adeloye*