Tanimu Yakubu tells lawmakers Nigeria’s expenditure controls stopped the N1.3 billion appropriation from ever becoming actual spending
The Budget Office of the Federation has said no public funds were released to the non-existent Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), as statutory expenditure controls prevented the appropriation from translating into actual spending.
Director-General of the Budget Office, Tanimu Yakubu, disclosed this on Friday while appearing before the House of Representatives ad hoc committee, chaired by Yusuf Gagdi, investigating the council’s establishment and its inclusion in the 2026 Appropriation Act.
The matter remains under active investigation by the police, the ICPC and the National Assembly, and is sub judice.
Why the Budget Office says no funds moved
Yakubu said the public had wrongly conflated parliamentary appropriation with government expenditure, stressing that the budgetary provision never advanced beyond the appropriation stage.
“The conclusion is firm. Not one kobo of the personnel provision could lawfully have been drawn, and not one kobo was drawn. The overhead provision never matured into a lawful cash release. The capital provision never matured into procurement or expenditure,” he said.
He explained that although the National Assembly appropriated N1.302 billion for the council, comprising N802,978,783 for personnel, N200 million for overhead, and N300 million for capital expenditure, none of the statutory conditions required for spending public funds was fulfilled.
He said no procurement plan was approved, no Ministerial Tenders Board considered any transaction, no Bureau of Public Procurement Certificate of No Objection was issued, and no treasury releases followed.
The Budget Office also withheld the Financial Clearance required before any agency can recruit staff or commence salary payments, and formally requested that all payment instruments relating to the council be withheld once concerns emerged over its legal status.
“The controls did not discover a loss after the event. They prevented the event. The money never moved because the controls held,” he said.
Budget Office defends its own role in the scandal
Yakubu said his office neither created the PFIPC nor approved its establishment, noting that the Office of the Accountant-General had already assigned the council an administrative budget code, while the Office of the Head of the Civil Service had issued an establishment approval and recruitment waiver before the Budget Office received its proposal.
He said the council had requested N3.85 billion for personnel costs, but the Budget Office rejected that estimate and independently calculated a lower figure using approved staffing and salary structures.
“It was not a compromise with the council. It was an independent fiscal determination,” he said.
He traced the council’s inclusion in the budget to official government records linked to the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC), inaugurated under former President Muhammadu Buhari, and said different institutions exercise separate statutory powers over establishment approvals, recruitment, remuneration, financial clearance and procurement, ensuring no single office can convert an appropriation into public expenditure alone.
Background to the PFIPC scandal
The controversy became public after Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu, Femi Gbajabiamila, disowned Adeniyi Adeyemi and the PFIPC, with the presidency maintaining the agency does not exist under the current administration.
Police investigations began after Gbajabiamila petitioned the Inspector-General of Police and the State Security Service on 17 October 2025, alleging forgery and impersonation.
Investigators arrested Adeyemi on 27 October 2025 at an office he allegedly operated within the Federal Secretariat, recovering correspondence with several government agencies and tracing 34 bank accounts allegedly linked to him.
Adeyemi has maintained his innocence, and in a recent interview with social media personality Martins Otse, known as VeryDarkMan, said he was in police detention while the 2026 budget was being processed and could not say for certain whether Gbajabiamila was involved in his appointment.
Gbajabiamila has since issued Adeyemi a pre-action notice demanding he withdraw his claims or face a N10 billion defamation suit and criminal proceedings. Adeyemi was rearrested in July after a Federal High Court judge issued a warrant against him for repeatedly failing to appear in court, and the ICPC has since questioned Gbajabiamila as part of its own probe.
