I first received a WhatsApp forward about the scandal from notable University of Texas history professor Toyin Falola. I didn’t read it. I thought it was just another corruption scandal, the sort I have become tragically inured to.

A few days later, my friend Professor Moses Ochonu forwarded another version of it to me. I told him Professor Falola, mentor to both of us, had already sent it to me but that I didn’t bother to read it because I had become jaded on issues like that. But social media soon became suffused with different tidbits of the scandal, and I could no longer ignore it.

I am now suspending the travelogue I had planned to write on my recent visit to Trinidad and Tobago where I was invited to deliver a keynote address at an international conference on media and communication. Nigeria, as it often does, has imposed its madness on my literary itinerary.

The story is almost too insane to be true. A certain Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Mathew, also written in official statements as Adeyemi Adeniyi Matthew, presented himself as Director-General of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, sometimes twinned with the Presidential Economic Advisory Council.

The Presidency now says the body does not exist. In a June 11 disclaimer and a fuller July 1 statement, the State House said Adeyemi was an impostor, that his appointment letter was forged, that he falsely paraded himself as a presidential appointee and that the police had already filed criminal charges against him.

According to the Presidency, the drama began when the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission complained in October 2025 that another supposed government body was operating in its orbit. Foreign Affairs also reportedly grew uneasy after Adeyemi held meetings with ambassadors. The Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, then wrote the DSS and the Police to investigate what he described as forged appointment letters.

Adeyemi was later arrested at an office in the Federal Secretariat Complex in Abuja. Police reportedly searched his office and residence, found documents they characterized as forged and accused him of operating 34 bank accounts, including nine in the names of allegedly fictitious entities.

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The Presidency says he even used his papers to open a CBN account by misleading the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, although no government money was transferred into the account.

If that were all, this would be a straightforward story of a brazen con man who found a costume in the wardrobe of power and decided to wear it. But that is not all.

Before the Presidency disowned him, Adeyemi and his council were not anonymous. He led a management team to the EFCC headquarters. Premium Times reported that the visit was part of a partnership to strengthen Nigeria’s investment climate ahead of a proposed World Investment Summit.

PM News similarly reported that EFCC Chairman Ola Olukoyede received him and his team. In the images and accounts that circulated later, the EFCC encounter took on even more symbolic weight because of claims that Adeyemi received an EFCC plaque. Whether or not every detail of that ceremonial exchange survives independent verification, the larger fact is that a supposed fake agency gained access to the nation’s foremost anti-corruption institution, among several prominent institutions.

Perhaps the most curious is the council’s appearance in the national budget. ICIR and Channels TV reported that the council was captured in the 2026 budget with more than N1.3 billion. That single fact turns this from a case of impersonation into a study in state porosity.

An impostor can print a fake letter. He can design a fake letterhead. He can borrow solemn English from government circulars and paste a coat of arms on a document. But how does a nonexistent presidential council find its way into the budget?

The .gov.ng domain controversy deepens the absurdity. Nigeria’s .gov.ng domain is not supposed to be bought from roadside web designers. It is reserved for government institutions and requires official authorization and verification.

If pfipc.gov.ng existed, and if it passed through the required government gatekeeping protocols, then somebody either forged papers successfully through a sleeping verification system or someone within the state gave it a helping hand. Either possibility is damning.

Adeyemi, for his part, has not gone quietly. He says he had a genuine appointment. He has accused Gbajabiamila of collecting N400 million through a proxy, demanding another N200 million and asking for 48 percent of a purported N27.4 billion take-off grant. He says his refusal to surrender the share caused his troubles.

These are grave allegations, but they are still allegations. So far, the public has not seen bank records, messages, recordings and receipts that would independently establish them.

Adeyemi is not a neutral witness in his own cause, so we can’t assume the facticity of his claims on face value. The Presidency and TheCable have drawn attention to his earlier public self-fashioning as a leader of the World Youth Organisation, which Nigerian newspapers once reported as an affiliate of the United Nations.

That claim later came under challenge because no such UN youth organ existed in the form he presented it. In other words, the man at the center of the PFIPC scandal appears to have a prior history of manufacturing proximity to grand institutions.

But the Presidency should not celebrate too quickly. Adeyemi’s credibility problems do not absolve the state. A thief who steals police uniform is a criminal. But if he uses the uniform to sleep in police barracks, command patrol vans, receive salutes from officers and collect allowances from the police budget, the scandal no longer belongs to the thief alone. It belongs to the police.

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That is why the most plausible explanation is not a tidy binary. It is not simply that Adeyemi beat the system. Nor is it yet proven that Gbajabiamila co-designed the scheme and later turned on him after a quarrel over loot sharing.

The evidence available to the public supports a more troubling middle ground. Adeyemi was likely the prime mover of an elaborate institutional fraud, but he almost certainly benefited from either complicity, negligence or the habitual stupidity of Nigerian bureaucracy.

There are global parallels, but none is an exact twin. In Gujarat, India, a man named Sandeep Rajput allegedly created a fake Irrigation Project Division office, forged seals and signatures, submitted official-looking proposals and got more than 40 million Indian rupees in government grants released. That is probably the closest parallel because it involved not just impersonation but entry into public finance.

Also in India, Kiran Patel allegedly posed as an official of the Prime Minister’s Office and enjoyed official security and hospitality in Jammu and Kashmir before his arrest. His case resembles Adeyemi’s use of proximity to the presidency as a password to bureaucratic reverence.

In China, Zhao Xiyong posed as a State Council official, toured provinces, gave speeches and was received by local leaders who apparently lacked the courage or curiosity to ask basic questions.

In Ghana, a fake U.S. embassy operated for years, issued counterfeit visas and survived partly because corrupt officials were reportedly paid to look away.

These cases tell us something universal about power. Bureaucracies worship symbols. A seal, a title, a convoy, a letterhead, a foreign-sounding summit, a grandiose acronym and a confident fool in a well-cut suit can suspend institutional reason. In societies where hierarchy is fetishized, verification is often treated as disrespect or, as we like to say in Nigeria, “rudeness to constituted authority.”

The Nigerian state is at once overbearing and absent, performative and incompetent, obsessed with protocol but contemptuous of process. It will ask a poor widow for a sworn affidavit before paying her pension arrears but will allow a phantom council to stroll through elite institutions with the swagger of presidential legitimacy.

The question Nigerians should insist on is not merely whether Adeyemi forged documents. The Presidency has made that case and the court will decide. The bigger question is who opened the doors.

Who gave him office space? Who received his letters? Who cleared his delegation? Who processed his domain? Who inserted or failed to remove the budget line? Who saw the words “Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council” and did not ask, “Which law created this body?”

The scandal is not that Nigeria produced a man audacious enough to impersonate the state. Every country produces such men. The scandal is that the Nigerian state, with all its security agencies, protocol offices, budget departments, domain regulators and anti-corruption theatrics, may have been too hollow to notice that it was being impersonated from within its own shadow.

Adeyemi may yet be shown to be a lone con artist. Gbajabiamila may yet be vindicated. Or an independent investigation may uncover something darker. But what the public already knows is enough to indict the system. A government that can be mimicked this successfully has already confessed to being indistinguishable from its counterfeit.

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.

When I chose to visit Nigeria in 2023 after seven years of staying away, family and friends cautioned that the change of leadership from Muhammadu Buhari to Bola Ahmed Tinubu should not anesthetize me into a false sense of security.

But many people that I know to be close to President Tinubu swore that he had vowed never to hound any critic and that I would never be arrested or detained.

They said Tinubu was a discursive democrat who recognized the right of citizens to vigorously ventilate their angst and anger, however disagreeably they may do so. They pointed me to the fact of his having never sued anyone even when multiple people libeled him daily. I was persuaded.

In fact, a bragging right among Tinubu supporters is that even as a candidate he never sued anyone for libel in spite of the steadily unceasing cornucopia of manifestly defamatory statements against him on social media. Even as president, with complete control over the instruments of coercion, his supporters say, he has been remarkably restrained in the face of withering criticism from commentators and opponents.

I was almost convinced that Tinubu was genuinely persuaded by what theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have called agonistic pluralism, which is the idea that vigorous and intense disagreements are fundamental to a healthy democracy and that society should channel passionate political disputes into productive debate rather than strive for forced and false consensus.

But the last few weeks have shown that Tinubu, or people in his close circles, are trying to borrow a leaf from the book of past presidencies by showing intolerance for deliberative pluralism.

The ongoing detention of Omoyele Sowore and Ibrahim Aliyu Maisango, the Hausa activist known on social media as Bichiia Maisango, is a troubling signal that the Tinubu administration is either losing its democratic nerve or is allowing people acting in its name to drag it into the familiar cesspit of state intimidation.

Sowore is, of course, no stranger to state harassment. He has built a public life around provocation, resistance and confrontation with power. He can be intentionally abrasive, sometimes rhetorically excessive and almost always allergic to political conformity. But none of these is a crime. Democracies do not imprison citizens because their words offend the fragile ears of power. They do not turn presidential displeasure into a criminal justice project.

The charge against Sowore, stripped of its procedural clutter, is that he called President Tinubu a “criminal” on social media. The DSS reportedly demanded that he delete the post. He refused. The state then activated the Cybercrimes Act against him, like Buhari did a few years ago.

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Now he is in Kuje Correctional Centre after the court revoked his self-recognition bail and issued a bench warrant for his absence on June 16, even though he had appeared in court on June 15, when the court did not sit, informed court officials that he would be traveling to Lagos and requested a later date, only for the matter to be rescheduled for the very next day in what looked like an effort to ensnare him.

People can argue about Sowore’s tone. But the proper answer to harsh speech is more speech, not handcuffs. A president with Tinubu’s long history in opposition politics should know this more than most people. He benefitted from the moral economy of dissent. He used the oxygen of protest, media criticism and oppositional defiance to rise to national prominence. It would be a historic irony if, as president, he now helps to suffocate the very liberties that made his political career possible.

The case of Ibrahim Aliyu Maisango is even more disturbing because it is shrouded in the familiar opacity of Nigeria’s security state. His wife, Hauwa Mundi, says he was invited to DSS headquarters in Abuja on June 2, 2026, and detained after honoring the invitation. For two weeks, the family reportedly had no access to him. She was later allowed to see him but expressed concern about his health.

Maisango is not a bandit. He is not a terrorist. He is not known to lead an armed cell. He is only a Hausa activist whose social media advocacy centers on Hausa ethnic consciousness, the distinction between Hausa and Fulani identity, insecurity, northern leadership, banditry and what he considers the political marginalization of ordinary Hausa people in the North.

I have followed, studied and written about these questions for years. Although I have issues with Maisango’s idea of Hausa ethnic purism, which is sociologically and historically impossible, I have often said that the lazy, ahistorical “Hausa-Fulani” label is a political shorthand invented by the Southern press to simplify the complexity of Hausaphone northern Muslim identity. Read, among many articles I wrote on this, my January 9, 2016, column titled “Is There Such a Thing as ‘Hausa-Fulani’?”

Hausa and Fulani are distinct peoples with distinct histories, even though centuries of contact, Islam, intermarriage, commerce and state formation have created deep cultural entanglements between them. To insist on that distinction is not incitement. It is not treason. It is not a threat to national security. It is, at worst, a contestable claim in the marketplace of ideas. At best, it is a necessary correction of a historically sloppy elite vocabulary.

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If Maisango has called for violence, charge him publicly and let the evidence speak. If he has threatened anyone, put the threat before a judge. If he has broken a law, arraign him in open court. But detaining him in the shadows while unnamed officials mutter darkly about “dividing the country” is pure, unacceptable intimidation by insinuation.

Nigeria’s security agencies have perfected the art of treating thought as contraband. They arrest first, search for justification later and outsource explanation to anonymous whispers. When citizens ask why someone is being held, the response is often a fog of national security language designed to scare people away from scrutiny. That is how illegitimate and insecure states behave.

The DSS reportedly says it does not detain people without detention orders. That is not reassuring. A detention order is not a moral blank cheque. It is not a substitute for transparency. It does not answer the question about what exactly Maisango did. If his offense is serious enough to justify detention, it should be clear enough to state. If it is too embarrassing to state, then it is probably too flimsy to sustain.
There is a deeper danger here. The North is a graveyard of unasked questions. Entire communities are being emptied by bandits. Farmers pay taxes to terrorists. Villagers negotiate with kidnappers because the state has abandoned them. Traditional institutions have lost moral legitimacy in many places. Young people are angry, suspicious and politically restless. In such a climate, suppressing speech about Hausa identity, Fulani power, banditry and northern elite failure will only produce more resentment, drive debate underground, cause mutual suspicions to fester and convert grievances into conspiracies.

Tinubu should understand this. He was once on the receiving end of state repression. His political mythology is built around NADECO, exile, resistance and pro-democracy activism. His supporters still invoke June 12 as evidence of his democratic credentials. But June 12 and its symbolism mean nothing if the state can detain activists for speech, criminalize insult and hide behind security agencies when citizens demand accountability.

This is why Sowore and Maisango should be released. In Sowore’s case, the government should end this needless prosecution. A president who is daily called worse things by angry citizens should not be seen to be hiding behind the Cybercrimes Act to hound an activist. If Tinubu truly has the thick skin his admirers attribute to him, he should prove it by refusing to dignify insult with prosecution. Let Sowore speak. Let people judge him. That is how democracy works.

In Maisango’s case, the DSS should either charge him immediately in open court with a recognizable offense or release him without further delay. His health and access to family should not depend on the benevolence of security officials. He is a citizen, not a captive of imperial power.

The presidency also needs to send a clear message to security agencies that criticism of the president, ethnic self-definition, historical argument and social media advocacy are not crimes. Nigeria is already too fragile for the state to manufacture new enemies from citizens with strong opinions.

Tinubu still has a chance to show that the people who assured me in 2023 that he would not hound critics were not merely laundering wishful thinking as insider knowledge. He can show that his democratic credentials are not museum artifacts from the 1990s.

Release Sowore. Release Ibrahim Aliyu Maisango, known to his followers as Bichiia Maisango. Let the country breathe. Let citizens speak. Let arguments be defeated by better arguments, not by detention orders.

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism