While the nation has been fixated on what looks like a “big catch” in the drama between Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila and Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, the real thrill of the story has slipped past most Nigerians. Beneath the headlines and denials lies a plot so audacious it feels lifted from fiction. It is the tale of how a phantom agency was conceived, named, built, and pushed into the corridors of power by the sheer will of one man. The craft of it carries the unmistakable signature of an evil genius, the kind that haunts the pages of James Hadley Chase and, like all Chase stories, ends with the quiet, inevitable sound of cookies crumbling.
I have written two earlier interventions on this matter, and both trained the spotlight where it naturally fell at the time: on the elite. In “Bogus Council?” and “What in Nigeria Does Not Wear the Mask of the Fake?” and in “Femi Gbajabiamila: The Gentleman at the Center of Controversies?”, the scrutiny rested on the name that appeared most prominently in the documents, the petitions, and the whispers. That is how power narratives work. Scholars of political sociology call this the “elite culpability bias”, the tendency to assume that where scandal touches government, the hand of the powerful must be the first and only one involved. Robert Merton’s theory of unintended consequences also helps us here. When institutions become opaque, people begin to fill the vacuum with their own designs, and those designs sometimes outpace the very system they imitate.
But like every good Chase novel, the twist arrives late, and it comes from the person you least expect. The first tremor was a report by, The Cable with the jarring headline: “Adeniyi Adeyemi backtracks, says he’s unsure of Gbaja’s involvement in PFIPC fiasco.” Then, while the public was still trying to digest that, another video surfaced. This time it was with social critic Martins Otse, known as VeryDarkMan. In that exchange, Prince Adeyemi did something few suspects dare to do. He claimed authorship. Platinum News captured it under the headline: “Real reason I established Presidential Foreign Intervention Council — ‘Fake’ agency DG.” And you clicked, because how could you not?
In the report, the embattled Director General of the now-defunct Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council said the agency was born out of passion, not greed. He said he wanted to attract foreign investors, to burnish Nigeria’s image, to “write his name in gold” in service to President Bola Tinubu’s administration. He insisted he knew nothing about a N400 million office budget, and that he was in detention for 23 days between October and November when the agency’s allocation was allegedly prepared and defended. He claimed he gave the former Inspector General of Police the name and number of the person who facilitated his appointment letter. He said his friend, Dolapo Tanimola, who paid money for the agency’s take-off, died in a fire accident in Utako, Abuja. And he promised to walk into police and DSS offices to submit every document he had. “This whole thing is confusing,” he said, “especially when the Presidency said that the agency does not exist. How come? The agency that found its way into the national budget.”
The facts around him are already in the public domain. The PFIPC appeared in the 2026 Appropriation Act with a N1.302 billion line, despite the Presidency insisting it never existed. The Chief of Staff petitioned security agencies over alleged impersonation. The police filed an eight-count charge bordering on forgery, impersonation and obtaining by false pretence. Reports said 34 bank accounts were linked to the operation, some in the names of agencies that did not exist. President Tinubu directed the ICPC to investigate how the council was inserted. Yet through it all, Adeyemi maintained that every paper in his possession was legitimately obtained.
What makes this more than another scandal is the confession that has now reframed the entire narrative. Prince Adeyemi is saying, in effect, that the idea was his. The name, the mission, the vision, the follow-through. He conceived it. He pursued it. He became its DG. He secured office space in the Federal Secretariat. He got recruitment approval for 300 staff from the Office of the SGF. He interfaced with MDAs, with EFCC, with foreign missions. He planned a global summit. In criminology, this aligns with what Edwin Sutherland described in Differential Association Theory: behavior is learned through interaction, and ambition, when untethered, learns to mimic the state itself. It also echoes the work of sociologist Charles Tilly on “state-making as organized crime,” where the line between formal authority and entrepreneurial mimicry blurs. What we are seeing is not just impersonation. It is the privatization of statecraft.
And that is what makes the question so chilling. How does a man in his 30s, trained in Agronomy at LAUTECH, with no prior record in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, conceive an agency, get it into a federal budget, get it an office, and make it function, even if only on the surface? No ministry in Nigeria’s history was created by the private initiative of a single citizen. We do not credit individuals for the Ministry of Education, Health, or Agriculture. Yet here was someone who, according to his own account and media reports, moved from contesting SUG President at LAUTECH, to parading in 2016 as “President-General of the World Youth Organisation,” an affiliation the UN later denied, to claiming roles with youth UN bodies, to running a foundation, to allegedly serving as Special Adviser in Osun State, and finally to standing at the center of a federal budget line. Ogbomoso elders have since disowned him, saying he holds no recognized royal title. But the record he built, real or contrived, is not the record of a passive fraudster. It is the record of a man who studied the state, copied its language, and executed.
This is why the story keeps pulling me back to James Hadley Chase. Chase wrote over 90 hardboiled novels, and his genius was in showing how greed, betrayal, and chance turn clever plans to dust. His characters are cynical, fast-talking, convinced they are smarter than the system. They build perfect schemes on paper. Then fate intervenes. A small detail crumbles. A partner betrays. A coincidence exposes. The ending is always ironic justice. In “That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles,” the message is blunt: you made your choices, now live with the mess. There is no sympathy in Chase’s world, only consequence. Scholars of crime fiction like Lee Horsley have noted that Chase’s appeal lies in this moral economy. The criminal world rewards nerve, but it punishes hubris.
Apply that lens to Adeyemi and the picture sharpens. If his account is true, he is not just a suspect. He is the author of the scheme. He is the brain. That is a different category of audacity. It moves the story from “who did this to government” to “how did government become imitable.” Political scientists studying institutional mimicry argue that when citizens perceive the state as distant and inaccessible, some will attempt to replicate it. They create NGOs that act like ministries, foundations that act like agencies, councils that act like parastatals. Most fail. A few, like this one, get far enough to appear in a budget book before the cookies crumble.
And crumble they did. The Presidency disowned the council. Investigations began. The man who wanted to be remembered for attracting investment now faces charges that could define him for life. It is classic Chase. The plan was clever. The execution was bold. The fall was inevitable.
At the end of the play, that is the lesson we are left with.The cookie did crumble. Not because the idea was small, but because in Nigeria, as in Chase, no one gets away with playing God with the state. The system may be slow, it may be porous, but it has a way of balancing itself. And when it does, all that is left is the story, the scandal, and the quiet truth that ambition without guardrails always ends the same way. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
