The ‘Fake Agency’: Abati, the Jonathan years and the president’s powers, by Andrew T Lawal

Reuben Abati is right that Nigeria’s alleged fake-agency scandal exposes a frightening failure of government controls. But there are two problems with his argument that deserve closer attention: the history he relies upon reaches back into a government in which he himself served, and his account of how Permanent Secretaries can be suspended is more complicated than the rules suggest.

Reuben Abati’s column on Nigeria’s latest alleged fake-agency scandal contains a warning that should not be dismissed simply because parts of his argument are contestable. A government that cannot confidently tell the public who is authorised to speak, appoint, spend and operate in its name has a serious problem.

On that much, Abati is right.

If people can obtain office space inside the federal bureaucracy, correspond with state governments, acquire official-looking documentation, appoint coordinators around the country and appear before public officials while the centre struggles to establish where their authority came from, the embarrassment belongs first to government. It is not enough to catch the person at the gate if someone inside the compound gave him the key.

But one date in Abati’s own column deserves much more attention than he gives it: July 2010.

George Buchi Nwabueze says the Made-in-Nigeria programme has been in the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation since July 2010. Abati repeats that claim in challenging ICPC: how, he asks in effect, could a programme sit inside the OSGF for 16 years and suddenly be discovered as unauthorised in 2026?

There is an awkward history buried inside that question.

July 2010 was during the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan. Abati was not yet Jonathan’s spokesman when the particular letter now being circulated was written. He joined the Presidency as Special Adviser on Media and Publicity in July 2011 and thereafter served at the centre of that government until 2015. Nobody should twist that fact into an allegation that Abati created the project, approved it or even knew about it. There is no evidence for any of those claims. But if Nwabueze wants Nigerians to accept a 16-year history as evidence of legitimacy, then that history necessarily runs through an administration in which Abati himself subsequently served for almost four years.

That makes the 2010 document even more important.

What does it actually say?

The letter Nwabueze has published was addressed to “Buchi George”, then Executive Director of The Hats Centre in Owerri. It acknowledged his proposal for a “Made in Naija” project to be held in Ireland as part of Nigeria’s 50th anniversary and advised him to forward the proposal to the Nigerian High Commission in Ireland for possible consideration.

That is evidence of contact with government. It is not obviously evidence that government created an agency.

If this is being presented as the birth certificate of the present office, then the obvious question is where the rest of the birth record is.

At what point did a proposal from the Executive Director of The Hats Centre become an office of the Federal Government? Who approved that transition? Under what authority? Where is the instrument creating the office? When was its structure approved? Who authorised its national and state coordinators? Who determined that its head could carry the titles subsequently used?

The history of a proposal is not necessarily the history of an agency. A relationship with government is not the same thing as being government.

That distinction runs through almost every document now being offered in Nwabueze’s defence.

He points to the Federal Government’s Made-in-Nigeria policy. That policy existed. He points to Executive Orders 003 and 005. They exist. They provide strong policy backing for local procurement, Nigerian participation and the promotion of indigenous goods and services.

But a policy objective does not automatically create every office established in its name.

Then there is the October 3, 2025 appointment letter. That document deserves serious treatment. On its face, it purports to appoint Nwabueze National Coordinator and Executive Director of the Made-in-Nigeria Project Office for five years, refers to regional and state structures and provides temporary accommodation in Room B53 of the OSGF complex. If authentic, it is important evidence that officials within government were involved.

But authenticity is only the first question. Authority is the next.

Who authorised the Permanent Secretary who signed it? What instrument authorised the creation of the office itself? Could a Permanent Secretary confer those powers? Was there presidential approval? Was there an approved organisation chart? Was this a government agency, an OSGF project office, a public-private initiative or a private programme enjoying government support?

Those descriptions are not interchangeable.

Indeed, Nwabueze’s own defence now appears to describe the initiative as a project office rather than a statutory agency. That may answer one accusation, but it immediately raises another question: if it was simply a project initiative, how did it acquire the titles, physical location and nationwide structure capable of giving outsiders the impression that they were dealing with an arm of the Federal Government?

This is why the existence of official documents cannot end ICPC’s investigation. It may be the reason the investigation is necessary.

Nigeria has already seen the same problem in another form. The disputed Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council managed to acquire official-looking documentation, relationships and even an appearance in the federal budget before questions arose about the legal authority for its existence. The lesson is uncomfortable but straightforward: a system can process something without thereby making it lawful.

Abati himself begins his column with ghost workers. He should follow that analogy to its logical conclusion.

A ghost worker succeeds precisely because real government systems accommodate something that should not be there. There may be a personnel number, a payroll entry, a bank payment and approvals from people whose signatures are perfectly genuine.

The worker does not become real because IPPIS paid him.

Why should the analytical rule change when the ghost grows from one employee into an office?

Sometimes the paper trail is not the answer to an investigation. It is the crime scene.

There is another part of Abati’s argument where the rules deserve closer reading.

He criticises the way the suspension of three Permanent Secretaries was announced after ICPC Chairman Musa Aliyu met President Bola Tinubu. Abati makes two points. First, the Permanent Secretaries should have been queried by the Head of the Civil Service, allowed to respond, and only then should action have followed. Second, he questions why the ICPC Chairman, having briefed the President, should also emerge from the Villa to announce the President’s decisions.

The second half of that complaint is his best point.

The first does not survive contact with the rules quite so easily.

Section 171(1) of the Constitution vests in the President the power to appoint persons to, and remove them from, the offices listed in that section. Those offices expressly include a Permanent Secretary in any Ministry and the Head of any Extra-Ministerial Department of the Federal Government. The Constitution does not use the word “suspension” there, and it would be careless to pretend that it does. But there can be little argument about where the Constitution places the ultimate power of appointment and removal of Permanent Secretaries. It places it in the President.

Beneath that sits Public Service Rule 030406.

It is not the query-and-hearing provision at all. It applies where a prima facie case, serious in nature, has been established against an officer and it is considered necessary in the public interest that the officer be immediately prohibited from carrying out official duties pending investigation into the misconduct. Suspension under that rule is therefore precautionary in character. It is not removal, and it does not require that the investigation must first have been completed before the officer can be kept away from office. Nigerian courts have similarly treated suspension as an interim device that allows investigation to proceed.

There is, to be clear, a separate rule dealing specifically with disciplinary proceedings against Permanent Secretaries. Rule 100701 gives the Head of the Civil Service a defined role, including notification of the allegation and an opportunity for the Permanent Secretary to respond. That procedure cannot simply be wished away.

The legitimate legal question, therefore, is not as simple as saying that no action could be taken until a query had first travelled through the entire disciplinary process.

Rule 030406 itself contemplates suspension pending investigationwhere the threshold for such action has been met. The more exact question is how that precautionary power interacts, in the case of a Permanent Secretary, with the special procedure in Rule 100701 and with the President’s constitutional authority under Section 171.

That is a question the government should be able to answer.

It is quite different from suggesting that interim suspension before the conclusion of an investigation is somehow alien to Nigerian public administration.

There is also history here that Abati knows particularly well.

On February 20, 2014, President Goodluck Jonathan suspended Central Bank Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi while investigations were still ongoing. The presidential statement announcing that decision was signed by Reuben Abati, then Special Adviser on Media and Publicity. Abati subsequently appeared before State House correspondents and defended the distinction between suspension and removal.

That episode remains controversial, and it cannot be cited as proof that every presidential suspension is lawful.

Its relevance is narrower.

Abati has himself occupied the communications position from which a President’s decision to temporarily separate a senior public officer from his duties, before final adjudication of the allegations, had to be explained to Nigerians.

That history makes the present argument less straightforward than his column suggests.

Where Abati has firmer ground is on who should have announced President Tinubu’s decision.

The ICPC Chairman is not the President’s spokesman. If the President ordered the suspension of Permanent Secretaries, the Presidency, the Head of Service or another appropriate executive authority would have been the institutionally cleaner channel through which to communicate it.

But communications protocol and investigative validity are not the same thing.

An investigator can be the wrong messenger without necessarily carrying the wrong evidence.

Nor should ICPC be given a blank cheque merely because Nwabueze’s documents raise questions.

The Commission must eventually show its work. If it calls an office unauthorised, it should be capable of identifying the missing legal instrument, invalid delegation, unauthorised expenditure, false representation or other defect upon which that conclusion rests. It should distinguish clearly between suspicion, interim findings and established facts. If public officials facilitated an unauthorised structure, investigators must determine whether that amounted to negligence, administrative misconduct or criminal conduct. And if any person named in the affair is ultimately cleared, that should be made public with the same seriousness with which the allegation was announced.

That is not an argument for ending the investigation.

It is an argument for taking it all the way.

ICPC’s statutory role itself extends beyond waiting for completed criminal cases. Section 6 of the ICPC Act requires the Commission not only to investigate corruption allegations but also to examine the practices and systems of public bodies where those systems facilitate corruption and to recommend corrective measures. The scandal before it is therefore not merely about Nwabueze. It is about the government machinery that made whatever happened possible.

That brings the argument back to where Abati began.

He is right that Nigeria has a serious institutional problem if a disputed entity can acquire government correspondence, office space, public visibility and relationships across successive administrations without anybody being able to produce a simple and authoritative answer to the question: who created this office and under what power?

But that failure cuts both ways.

It cannot simultaneously be evidence that government systems are dangerously weak and proof that anything which successfully passed through those weak systems must therefore be legitimate.

The decisive evidence will not be a photograph with a governor, a room number in Abuja, an official letterhead or even a genuine signature.

Investigators have to follow the authority backwards.

Who created what? Who had the power to approve it? Which document conferred that power? How did a 2010 proposal from The Hats Centre become, if it did, a project office operating from within the OSGF? Who authorised the later appointments? Who paid for its activities? What government assets were used? What did successive officials know? And what exactly happened between the Jonathan-era correspondence now being relied upon and the elaborate structure that existed by 2025?

Those questions may ultimately vindicate part of Nwabueze’s account. They may expose failures elsewhere in government. They may even require ICPC to refine some of its initial language.

But 16 years of paperwork would prove 16 years of legality only if that paperwork forms an unbroken chain of lawful authority.

Otherwise, it may prove something rather different: that an institutional failure was allowed to live for a very long time.

Abati has looked at a stranger sitting comfortably in the family parlour and asked, quite reasonably, how he got inside.

The mistake is to assume that because somebody gave him a chair, he must therefore own the house.

Andrew T. Lawal writes on governance, public institutions and national affairs, he can be reached on [email protected]