Femi Akintunde-Johnson
Nothing exposes the fragility of a system more brutally than discovering that it cannot distinguish between what it created and what it did not.
That, perhaps, is the most disturbing lesson from the embarrassing controversy surrounding the purported Presidential Council on Foreign Investment Promotion – an outfit said to have enjoyed office accommodation within the Federal Secretariat, received budgetary allocation in the 2026 Appropriation, operated with apparent official recognition, and is now being described as fraudulent. Depending on which official explanation one chooses to believe, somebody either brilliantly infiltrated the machinery of government or, even more frighteningly, nobody in government truly knew what machinery was running beside them. Neither possibility inspires confidence.
As is customary, investigations have been announced. The matter has reportedly been referred to the appropriate anti-corruption agency. Statements have been issued. Distancing has commenced. Fingers have found convenient directions in which to point. Yet the question ordinary Nigerians are asking is painfully simple: how does an institution that supposedly never existed acquire an office, appear in a national budget, function within the precincts of government and interact with public institutions without someone asking the most elementary question – who authorised this?
Perhaps the investigation will eventually establish that there was fraud of astonishing sophistication. If so, the perpetrators deserve the full weight of the law. But even then, another question stubbornly survives: what kind of administrative architecture permits such an extraordinary deception to flourish?
The problem with Nigeria has never been merely that people attempt fraud. Every society produces individuals willing to exploit loopholes. The greater tragedy is that our public institutions appear remarkably gifted at manufacturing those loopholes and then acting surprised when someone walks through them.
Somewhere between bureaucracy and impunity, accountability quietly packs its bags and relocates.
This latest episode is only a symptom of a deeper institutional illness. Over the years, Nigerians have become accustomed to government agencies duplicating responsibilities, committees supervising other committees, presidential panels overlapping statutory commissions, task forces performing functions already assigned to established departments, and special advisers advising special assistants who themselves report to senior special advisers. We have built such an elaborate administrative maze that even those entrusted with navigating it occasionally appear lost.
One ministry launches an initiative that another ministry quietly claims as its own. A regulatory agency issues a directive only for another regulator to contradict it days later. Government departments speak different administrative languages while supposedly pursuing the same national objectives. Coordination has become aspirational rather than operational.
The inevitable consequence is institutional confusion. Confusion, unfortunately, is fertile ground for manipulation.
When systems become excessively complicated, they cease to protect the public and begin protecting inefficiency. Layers multiply, procedures lengthen, oversight weakens and responsibility dissolves into an endless relay race where everyone signs documents but nobody owns decisions. In such an environment, accountability becomes an orphan.
One occasionally suspects that Nigeria has perfected the rare art of creating institutions faster than it creates institutional discipline.
Our national instinct, whenever confronted with a persistent problem, is to establish another committee, another council, another agency or another office. It is almost as though multiplication itself has become a development strategy. Yet effective governance is not measured by the number of institutions occupying government buildings; it is measured by the clarity of their mandates, the competence of their personnel and the certainty that someone answers when things go wrong.
This is where mature democracies differ. Institutions are designed not merely to function but to verify one another continuously. Internal controls are not decorative appendages inserted into annual reports. Audit mechanisms are expected to detect anomalies long before journalists, whistle-blowers or social media stumble upon them. Verification is woven into the fabric of administration, not activated only after embarrassment has occurred.
Nigeria, by contrast, often appears to conduct governance on the honour system, occasionally interrupted by scandal.
The annual budget itself deserves renewed scrutiny. Appropriation should represent one of the most rigorously interrogated documents in any democracy. Every allocation ought to correspond to a legally established institution with a clearly defined mandate, measurable deliverables and identifiable supervisory authority. If an entity can allegedly find its way into the national budget without robust verification, then the issue extends far beyond one questionable council. It raises uncomfortable questions about legislative diligence, executive coordination and bureaucratic quality control.
Equally worrying is our predictable national choreography whenever controversy erupts. Nobody appears eager to accept ownership. Responsibility migrates elegantly from one office to another until it eventually disappears into the dense forest of “ongoing investigations”. By then, public attention has shifted elsewhere and the system quietly resumes its familiar rhythm.
But institutions do not mature through perpetual investigations. They mature through consequences.
When officials responsible for glaring administrative failures are identified and held personally accountable, systems learn. When negligence attracts no meaningful sanction, systems simply adjust themselves to accommodate the next scandal. Bureaucracies, much like children, quickly discover the difference between rules that exist on paper and rules that carry real consequences.
This is why institutional reform must move beyond organisational charts and constitutional amendments. Nigeria requires a culture of verification before implementation, not after exposure. Every presidential initiative should pass through transparent legal authentication. Every government office should maintain publicly accessible records of its statutory authority. Every budget line should be traceable to an existing legal framework. Digital governance should make phantom institutions practically impossible to sustain. Internal audits should become continuous rather than ceremonial. Parliamentary oversight should interrogate not only expenditure but institutional legitimacy itself.
Above all, public office must cease to be a vast landscape where responsibility is endlessly shared but rarely owned.
The greatest strength of any nation is not the eloquence of its leaders or the magnificence of its policies. It is the quiet reliability of institutions that continue to function regardless of personalities. Strong institutions ask difficult questions before crises emerge. Weak institutions ask them afterwards.
If this latest controversy achieves anything worthwhile, let it provoke more than another investigation file gathering dust on another official shelf. Let it compel a sober examination of how government validates itself, supervises itself and corrects itself. Because when institutions lose the capacity to recognise their own boundaries, citizens inevitably begin questioning whether anyone is truly in charge.
And no democracy, however optimistic its rhetoric, can flourish for long when its institutions appear to require their own identity cards.