By Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
Nigeria is a wonderfully bizarre country. But I suppose that is not news to you. For some reason, and not without justification, we have unfortunately garnered an odious reputation as a fraudsters’ den, with photos of baretorsoed young Nigerians crammed into small rooms, computers open, supposedly on the prowl to scam some unsuspecting mugu, as the fraudsters call them. A recent Oxford University study placed Nigeria fifth in the World Cybercrime Index (WCI), behind Russia in first place, Ukraine in second, China in third and the USA in fourth. Yet Nigeria has the worst PR of these countries. Sometimes even worse than India, where cybercrime and scam networks operate from what are effectively established offices that strike across the world. The “Nigerian prince”, as the scammer has become known, is a running joke in pop culture.
It is true that some Nigerians have been at the heart of some of the most scandalous scam network busts in recent history, or even the most absurd stories, like the fraudster who sold a non-existent airport to a Brazilian bank. Or romance scams like the one that defrauded a poor French woman, Anne, into thinking she was in an entanglement with American actor Brad Pitt, to which she committed $850,000 to a cybercrime network believed to be operating out of Nigeria.
These are all regular occurrences, I suppose, that capitalise on individual gullibility or avarice, or corporate slips and loopholes to defraud unsuspecting victims. It is nothing compared to the scale of the so-called Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), where a phantom government agency, complete with all the requisite paraphernalia, was allegedly nothing more than a scam.
Nigerians have had at least a week to ponder how this scam was even possible and somehow it has still remained a headscratcher. The man at the centre of the allegations, one Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Mathew, somehow set up the PFIPC as a legitimate federal body, secured office space inside the Federal Secretariat and held meetings with real government officials and diplomats. Beyond the scandal and the questions, what this case exposed is the scale of institutional vulnerabilities and complicity through which Nigeria is being exploited.
Questions have been swirling in the ether as to how this phantom agency bypassed multiple verification layers to secure office space at the secretariat and, most damaging perhaps, smuggled a line item into the national budget to the tune of N1.3 billion under the name of the agency. If a fraudster can find his way into the national budget, who else might already be there? Boko Haram? Bandits? Are we, perhaps, unwittingly bankrolling our own misery as a nation?
While public officials sitting at the head of legitimate agencies have been known to defraud the government of billions through budget padding, and have often got away with it scot-free, the fact that an allegedly fake institution succeeded in doing this demonstrates systemic institutional frailties.
While the government, through its spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, has spared no effort in dismissing Mr Adeyemi as a fraudster with a reputation for institutional scams, such as parading himself as the president-general of a UN organisation, the World Youth Organisation, after the UN itself denied the existence of the organisation and any knowledge of Mr Adeyemi, it has still not explained how this person of questionable repute gained access to government facilities or how he was able to secure budgetary allocations for a phantom agency.
So here, we have Mr Adeyemi’s claims to build on until disproved. He alleges that he paid a proxy to the President’s Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, some N400 million to secure this position. His failure to pay an additional N200 million, allegedly, is the reason he is being thrown under the bus. In addition, he claims that Gbajabiamila demanded a 48 per cent kickback from the N27.4 billion take-off grant for the commission, which he also rejected. And to think Nzeogwu and co. truncated the First Republic with bloody murders for the “ten percenters”. What would they have done to the 50 percenters?
These are no doubt serious allegations against Gbajabiamila and while the law holds that he who alleges must prove, it behoves the Chief of Staff to clear his name for the sake of transparency and because of his proximity to the president.
For this reason, the president must ensure these allegations are properly investigated. If Gbaja is tainted by these allegations, the government is smeared. While the standard response has been to cut out the guilty party, as the Buhari government did when it sacked its Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, and was arraigned before a court where he was eventually discharged.
What is happening with the phantom agency, the sheer volume of financial infrastructure operated by Adeyemi, including the dozens of accounts he allegedly deceived the Central Bank into opening, and some opened under non-existent names, all used to funnel money, is a huge indictment of the government and the systemic frailties by which it is administered. Details of how he managed to get this done will surface in time, one hopes, but what is clear now is that it would not have been possible without the active connivance of someone in government, or someone with access to government.
The implication is that there is a level of porosity in governance that allows for this level of scam to be conceived and executed with the degree of success this one appears to have enjoyed. While Adeyemi continues to insist that his defence rests on the legitimacy of his claims, that he is in possession of a legitimate appointment letter, all this does is expose how easily the aesthetic of authority, official letterheads, security passes and physical office spaces at the Federal Secretariat, can be commandeered for personal aggrandisement, whether by scammers or government officials. The implications are not only damaging for financial security but for national security as well.
As we all know, the security failures in the country and the scale of governmental corruption are symptoms of the structural corruption embedded in the system. If Adeyemi somehow exposes internal blackmail within the government, it might end up being some kind of service to the nation.
However, the Tinubu government must seize this as a huge opportunity to clean up the government and how the government works to serve Nigerians. It is one thing for national security to be compromised in the way ours has been. It will be quite another for the government itself to be compromised this way.
Abubakar Adam Ibrahim can be reached at abubakaradam@dailytrust.com Twitter: @Abbakar_himself Whatsapp: 08020621270
