The ghost DG and Nigeria’s unreported spending

BY TOSIN ADEOTI

The Federal Secretariat in Abuja is currently playing host to one of those absurd political controversies. The presidency has officially accused a man named Adeniyi Adeyemi of running a total fiction. They accuse him of forging government appointment letters and falsely presenting himself as the director-general of two entities called the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) and the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC). The presidency flatly maintains that these agencies do not exist.

But beneath this declaration of forgery lies a deeply amusing, highly embarrassing reality. This “phantom” director-general managed to secure an active office right inside the Federal Secretariat, recruit a sweeping staff of up to 300 people, and conduct formal high-level meetings with foreign diplomats and heads of valid government agencies. Most damningly, a look at the statutory 2026 Appropriation Act reveals that the PFIPC was explicitly allocated ₦1.3 billion in public funds.

It is a uniquely Nigerian comedy: an agency that is officially labelled a criminal mirage by the executive, yet possesses state-approved cash, physical real estate, a massive payroll, and diplomatic access.

While the public trades gossip over how a man could casually invent a state agency inside the seat of power, the entire bizarre episode serves as a perfect, low-stakes microcosm of a far more massive financial scandal that no one is talking about. We are laughing at a ₦1.3 billion ghost council, entirely blind to the fact that the state itself is running a multi-trillion-naira parallel economy in the dark.

On July 1, 2026, Reuters reported that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pulled back the curtain on this nationwide performance, dropping a massive statistical bomb on our financial credibility. According to the IMF’s latest Article IV consultation, Nigeria failed to record public expenditures equivalent to approximately two percent of its entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in recent official budgets.

To the average citizen, “two percent of GDP” sounds like an abstract, technocratic rounding error. It is not. With Nigeria’s economy currently valued at approximately ₦441.5 trillion, that innocent-looking percentage translates to a jaw-dropping ₦8.8 trillion in public money that went completely unrecorded in official budget documents.

Suddenly, the story of a man forging an agency with ₦1.3 billion doesn’t seem so far-fetched. If the state can casually spend ₦8.8 trillion completely outside its own official bookkeeping, then the boundaries between what is legal, what is illegal, what exists, and what is a phantom completely dissolve.

Christian Ebeke, the IMF’s resident representative in Nigeria, noted with clinical understatement that this massive discrepancy stems from large-scale government projects executed off-budget entirely.

Do you understand what this means? The IMF is saying that the Nigerian state is casually awarding multi-trillion naira contracts, moving massive capital, and building infrastructure completely outside the statutory oversight of the auditor-general, the procurement laws, and the citizens whose future is being leveraged to fund it. It is a parallel universe where money is allocated by executive whim, entirely bypassing the theatrical debates we watch on television when the national assembly swells the public budget bill to a record-breaking ₦68.32 trillion.

When trillions of naira flow through off-budget projects, the standard statutory checks and balances cease to exist. There are no competitive public bidding processes, no transparent oversight mechanisms, and no public ledgers to show who won the contracts or how the prices were determined. It creates a perfect, unregulated sandbox for institutional recklessness, whether it is a hidden capital project or a ghost council hidden inside the Federal Secretariat.

The real tragedy of this phantom bookkeeping is the profound moral asymmetry it imposes on the Nigerian people. For the past three years, ordinary citizens have been handed a strict, unyielding script of economic austerity. The poor have been told to tighten their belts, watch their disposable income vanish under aggressive currency devaluations, and bear the unmitigated brunt of subsidy removals. The state routinely tells the populace that the treasury is bare and that sacrifices must be made.

Yet, the IMF discovery proves that while the poor are being asked to bleed for the economy, the political elite have maintained access to a secret, ₦8.8 trillion treasury playground where money can be generated and spent entirely in the dark.

Tosin Adeoti writes on society, governance, and business, weaving history and observation into stories about how people and nations evolve. He is interested in ideas that help us build fairer and more thoughtful communities. He can be contacted via contact@tosinadeoti.com.