In the iconic television series, Game of Thrones, that ran between 2011 to 2019, the cutthroat competition for power and dominance was at full play. As the pendulum of seeming victory swung among the various parties in the fictional setting of the series, there were always stern, multi-layered warnings about survival, vigilance, and inevitability that no matter how good things are during a long summer, dark and difficult times are always on the horizon. That was the inevitable truth behind the term “winter is coming” which one of the principal characters in the drama series, House Stark adopted as his motto. It has since become a global cultural shorthand used to warn others about impending trouble and economic downturns.
For nearly two months now and still counting, Nigerians and the global community have been watching astounded as the executive branch of the government has been enmeshed in an embarrassing show of criminal power play at the highest level. It revolves around the unlikely emergence of an organisation which claimed that it had been established by the presidency, a substantive director general appointed, office accommodation allocated to it within the complex for statutory agencies and its operations provided for in the already approved 2026 federal budget.
That the agency, the “Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council” (also called the Presidential Economic Advisory Council), was eventually declared “fake” and non-existent with Femi Gbajabiamila, Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu playing the whistle blower is comical.
It seems unusual because it is taken for granted that the machinery for the emergence of an agency from the executive branch is expected to be akin to the camel passing through the eye of needle. The process is supposed to not just go through but the product of something that has been extensively vetted. Getting the endorsement of the office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation is no routine exercise. Then for the office of the Accountant General of the Federation to give the requisite approval before an account can be opened with the Central Bank, the banker to the federal government, gives the impression that all the grounds have been covered.
However, given the nature of the power structure inherited from the military regimes, it is possible to pull off such a stunt. One language the various elected administrations inherited from the military is the amorphous expression “order from above”. For the military, it means that relevant higher authorities are aware and have given approval or directly initiated and ordered a particular action. Unfortunately, the expression was widely used to evade scrutiny and confirmation, requiring the officer confronted with whatever demands tabled before him to act expeditiously. A lot of harm was done to governance by such military fiat that circumvented procedures and the rule of law. By extension, it was used to perpetrate fraud, including the birthing of organisations unknown to civil service protocols.
Even more than 25 years into the fourth republic, the order from above dictum is still used to circumvent processes. As Secretary to the Government of the Federal Government, Babachir Lawal learned of his sack verbally as “order from above”, over the grass cutter episode, prompting him to ask who is the “above”.
What the present saga has shown is that the government does not know the number and names of the statutory agencies said to have been officially established. The closest we have come to knowing the agencies is the Stephen Oronsaye report of April 2012, a landmark 800-page document aimed to drastically reduce Nigeria’s high cost of governance, eliminate overlapping bureaucratic roles, and improve structural efficiency. The report, despite repeated promises of implementing its recommendations, has been confined to the archives. Rather, additional agencies have been created since then. Some of the 541 statutory and non-statutory federal agencies were created in the manner the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council was created.
What has emerged is that the departments and agencies are just too unwieldy in a system where “orders from above” still carry more weight than adherence to laid down procedures. A system not anchored on a discernible structure is vulnerable to manipulation. Before Tinubu’s administration, there have been previous Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthews, the daring “prince” in the eye of PFIPC storm.
The statements from the man, thankfully, do not lay claim to any interaction or direct communication with or approval or from President Tinubu. It may just be that Prince Matthew may be the key to unraveling previous but successful infiltration of the process for establishing agencies and getting them funded. Rather than see Matthew’s adventure as an isolated incident, we may just be on the cusp of opening the door to an augean stable in criminal manipulation of the budgetary system.
For the National Assembly, it is an opportunity for it to evaluate its oversight procedure and its vulnerabilities by getting an insight into how it got fooled into endorsing the budgetary allocation to an agency whose leadership did not appear before it to defend its budget. Godswill Akpabio’s Senate should jettison the decision to await the outcome of the investigation being undertaken by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC). Federal lawmakers have a lot to learn from the PFIPC saga, just like the presidency, the office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the office of the Accountant General of the Federation and even the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
An astonished global community is watching how all the arms of government were fooled by a man Aso Rock wants the world to believe acted alone. Of course. Matthews did not act alone. He walked the path his ilk had taken before. And nearly succeeded. If we miss the opportunity to mend a broken and vulnerable system and restore confidence in our governance structure, the international community may be circumspect in giving due recognition to official contacts and communication from the federal government. That is the winter that awaits if we do not use the opportunity offered by the ongoing PFIPC saga.
