Fake agencies and ghost workers expose Nigeria’s governance failures

Nigeria’s fake-agency scandal is not merely another entry in the country’s long list of public-sector corruption cases, Ehi Braimah argues. It exposes how government systems allowed institutions that allegedly do not exist to enter the public budget.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has ordered a comprehensive forensic audit of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, federal agencies and related government systems. Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy Taiwo Oyedele will coordinate the exercise, which is expected to examine payroll records, personnel and pension systems, bank accounts and the links among IPPIS, the Government Integrated Financial and Management Information System, Remita and the Treasury Single Account.

The discovery of the fictitious Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council has intensified the concern. The entity reportedly secured a 1.3 billion naira allocation in the 2026 federal budget. The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission later uncovered another alleged fake agency and said its promoter had created additional fictitious entities with forged legislative documents and bank accounts.

For Braimah, the issue is therefore larger than one alleged fraudster. It is a test of the architecture and quality of governance, because the system apparently contained enough gaps for the scheme to flourish.

Those gaps had already been mapped in the Stephen Oronsaye Report, submitted in 2012 after a presidential committee examined the structure of federal agencies and the cost of government. The report identified duplicated responsibilities, overlapping mandates and unnecessary bodies. It recommended reducing 263 statutory agencies to 161, abolishing 38, merging 52 and returning 14 to ministries as departments.

Tinubu’s Federal Executive Council approved implementation in February 2024, and an implementation committee received a 12-week deadline. More than two years later, Braimah says implementation appears selective and incomplete. The government has also continued creating, or considering, agencies with mandates that overlap existing institutions. That leaves the central question unresolved: why did another scandal have to expose weaknesses that earlier reform proposals had already identified?