For months in 2025, the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) operated like any other official agency within Nigeria’s sprawling federal bureaucracy. Housed in the heart of Abuja’s Federal Secretariat, the body claimed a mandate to draw much-needed foreign investment to Africa’s most populous nation. Career civil servants were assigned to its ranks, it ran an official website on Nigeria’s government .gov.ng domain, and it even secured approval to hire more than 300 new workers at a time when the federal government had implemented a full public sector recruitment freeze. Though its official website has since been taken down, its Instagram account, managed by PFIPC Director General Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, remains active.
How a fake presidential council ended up with a budget of almost $1m in Nigeria
