This fake DG Adeniyi Adeyemi deactivated everything — but the damage is done

The man who was parading himself as Director-General of a non-existent Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, Adeniyi Adeyemi, has taken down his Facebook account and websites. But let us not pretend this is the end of the matter. The presidency has already filed an eight-count charge of forgery and impersonation against him at the Federal High Court, and he faces up to 21 years in prison on each of seven charges. The question is how he got access to top government officials and even secured a budgetary allocation and CBN accounts in the first place.

Mr Adeyemi, who described himself on his Facebook page as an "astute administrator" and "financial wizard," had 9,300 followers before he deactivated. He claimed his 2026 World Investment Summit could generate N5 trillion in FDI. But Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to President Tinubu, declared two weeks ago that no such agency exists under this administration. The government never made the appointment. Yet this man was operating from the Federal Secretariat in Abuja, with senior civil servants deployed to work for him.

So who let him into those offices? Who approved the budget? Who opened the CBN accounts? Mr Adeyemi is denying everything and vowing to prove his innocence in court, but the trail of documents and correspondence with the Accountant General's office does not lie. Someone in government must answer for why a fake agency was allowed to function until a news report exposed it. How many more phantom agencies are out there collecting public funds right now?