By Ikechukwu Samuel
The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has formally rejected the interim investigative report released by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) regarding the fake Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), characterizing the document as a calculated attempt to reduce a massive institutional collapse into a single-person scam.
Reacting to the anti-graft agency’s findings, the rights monitoring group expressed profound disappointment, noting that the official narrative appears designed to address convenient trivialities while carefully skirting the deep-seated institutional complicity that enabled the phantom council to operate freely across government circles.
The position of the rights body highlights a familiar pattern in public anti-corruption inquiries, where official investigations routinely prioritize swift single-actor indictments over the uncomfortable work of probing high-level administrative enablement and systemic decay within the public service.
While the ICPC report established that one Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi allegedly forged official documentation, falsely designated himself as Director-General, established illegal satellite agencies, and operated unauthorized bank accounts, HURIWA maintained that these findings barely scrape the surface of a far broader national embarrassment.
The civil society group observed that the agency’s primary stance—that a single private citizen successfully infiltrated multiple Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) without high-level public sector enablement—stretches public credibility beyond reasonable limits.
Addressing the core contradictions surrounding the scandal, HURIWA raised critical queries regarding how a completely non-existent entity managed to secure official legitimacy, conduct formal meetings, and gain endorsements from established public institutions without triggering elementary verification protocols.
Most damningly, the group highlighted the unexplained bureaucratic anomaly that allowed a fake agency—subsequently disowned by the Presidency—to successfully embed itself into the 2026 Appropriation Act with a budgetary allocation running into billions of naira.
Rather than confronting these severe administrative lapses, the ICPC’s interim findings focus almost exclusively on the alleged criminal conduct of one suspect, leaving the institutional, budgetary, and high-office dimensions of the breach largely unaddressed.
Though the anti-graft commission conceded that severe vulnerabilities exist within inter-agency verification and internal control systems, HURIWA stressed that these weaknesses were sustained over time by conscious human decisions, deliberate official omissions, and systemic neglect.
The rights group expressed particular concern over reported recommendations favoring mere administrative sanctions for public officers whose negligence permitted the fake council to function, insisting that administrative slap-on-the-wrist measures are wholly inadequate for a scandal of this magnitude.
Where public sector actions or omissions facilitated criminal fraud running into billions of naira, HURIWA insisted that the rule of law demands full transparency and criminal prosecution rather than internal disciplinary cover-ups for culpable civil servants.
Consequently, the association urged the ICPC to expand its probe along every credible lead, emphasizing that no public office, administrative institution, or politically connected figure should be granted immunity from thorough criminal scrutiny.
HURIWA further called on the National Assembly to deepen its ongoing independent legislative inquiry into the matter, demanding a public mapping of the exact chain of official events that allowed the bogus council to breach national security architecture.
Emphasizing that the credibility of the federal government’s anti-corruption stance hangs in the balance, the group called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to mandate an unsparing investigation that subjects every implicated official to uniform standards of justice regardless of political proximity.
The civil society organization concluded that until the federal government provides a complete, transparent accounting of how a phantom council successfully operated within state structures, the PFIPC saga will remain a severe indictment of institutional integrity under the current administration.
