No defence, no committee hearing: How PFIPC’s N1.3bn budget sailed through without scrutiny

A Saturday Vanguard investigation has revealed that the controversial Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council received a N1.3 billion allocation in Nigeria’s 2026 budget without ever appearing before the Senate Committee responsible for verifying agency estimates — and that the Senate has since rejected attempts to launch a comprehensive legislative investigation into the scandal.

A ghost agency. A N1.3 billion budget. And a Senate that doesn’t want to investigate how it happened.

Saturday Vanguard’s scrutiny of pages 50 and 51 of the 2026 Appropriation Act has confirmed that the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council — the agency the Presidency insists never legally existed — was allocated N1,302,978,784 under Budget Code 0111062001, with N1,002,978,784 for recurrent expenditure and N300,000,000 for capital projects.

The breakdown is remarkable: N573,260,187 for personnel salaries, N229,718,596 for allowances and social contributions, N182,500,000 for logistics for a World Investment Summit 2026, N11,000,000 for strategic negotiation training and N10,000,000 for leadership development — all for an agency the government now calls fictitious.

More damning is how the allocation got there. Legislative sources told Saturday Vanguard that the PFIPC never went through the mandatory budget defence process. Its management never appeared before the Senate Committee on Establishment and Public Service Matters, chaired by Senator Cyril Oluwole Fasuyi, which is constitutionally required to verify agency budget estimates before passage.

Under standard parliamentary procedure, agency heads must defend their financial envelopes before sub-committees in open sessions where past performance is scrutinised before any allocation reaches the plenary. For the PFIPC, sources allege the figures received accelerated “hand-shake” approval — inserted without checks.

Nigerians are now demanding Senator Fasuyi’s committee explain whether the agency was ever invited, whether it appeared, and why no sanctions were applied when it didn’t.

The scandal reached the Senate floor — but instead of answers, the upper chamber swiftly rejected a push for a comprehensive legislative investigation into the PFIPC’s operations and budget allocation.

Meanwhile, Prince Adeyemi had, from his Federal Secretariat office, hosted foreign ambassadors and international partners — cementing the illusion of a legitimate government parastatal — before the Presidency declared the entire operation a fiction built on a single forged presidential appointment letter.