PFIPC horror show: Where were DSS, NSA, Police, EFCC, ICPC, CBN, NASS, Tinubu, during Adeyemi’s state capture?
By Lilian Onoh
In Nigeria, if you want the entire apparatus of State to swing into action and excel, let a cow go missing and within days, superior intelligence from the DSS, Army, etc., will result in the capture of the cow; and the cattle rustlers will be arrested, followed by a news release about the cow’s journey from Kaura Namoda to Ikot Ekpene that could rival Homer’s “the Odyssey”. This superior Intelligence gathering that can trace any missing cow from Nigeria to Niger Republic has still not found hundreds of kidnap victims, including Leah Sharibu and the Chibok girls who went missing in 2014.
The other way to ensure action is to post something negative about a powerful person on social media. Within hours, the DSS, Police, Army, EFCC, ICPC and the plethora of replica agencies in Nigeria will trace the person, and with immediate alacrity, they will be whisked from their homes, air freighted to a hostile part of the country and tortured in ways they can never speak of, before being released to face further financial and emotional torment in the form of multi-billion naira lawsuits and repeated demands to report to whichever security agency is officially in charge of the torment.
The recent physical and mental horror unleashed by the DSS on Professor Martin Aghaji, a 74-year-old internationally renowned cardiothoracic surgeon; as well as their wanton destruction of his property during what could best be described as a night time terrorist kidnapping operation by any other name, is a glaring example of this Nigerian Nightmare.
After the 30-man commando home style invasion and kidnapping of both he and his daughter by these DSS officials, he was whisked from Enugu to Lagos, imprisoned without explanation or charge for days only to be released without restitution and nothing other than a contemptuous, dismissive excuse that it was a mistake after the public furore became too loud!
No one is safe, be you Chioma Okoli, a pregnant woman who was arrested for making a social media post about the taste of tomato paste and who lost her unborn child in the process, or Adamu Mohammed who was arrested for saying former First Lady Aisha Buhari had grown fat.
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Yet for over a year, the DSS – Nigeria’s primary domestic intelligence agency – did not get any intelligence report that Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi had purportedly taken over the entire apparatus of Nigeria, including the President himself and allegedly invented a magic agency known as the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC), became its head and operated openly from office space legitimately allocated to him inside the Federal Secretariat, backed by billions allocated to his office in the official National Budget of Nigeria and operated 23 bank accounts for this PFIPC, including one with the CBN (allegedly)!
The plethora of agencies in charge of Nigeria want Nigerians to believe that for over a year, none of them had a clue that one man had so much power that he controlled the President of Nigeria – the person who presented the annual budget to the National Assembly; a budget with N1.3 billion allocated to the magic PFIPC!
We are also to believe that this Prince Adeniyi also controlled all the members of the National Assembly and supernaturally blinded them so that none of them knew that the Budget they passed after thorough oversight, had allocated billions to his magic agency; and that he had equally become the remote controller of every single arm of government and supernaturally made them cooperate to ensure the success of his enterprise!
Can the most mentally challenged person at the Federal Psychiatric Hospital suffering from Barron Von Munchhausen syndrome even come up with this claptrap of a tale? Methinks not.
I think it would have been more plausible to tell Nigerians that Jubril of Sudan resurrected in Aso Rock villa but in this incarnation, he is even more clueless than his previous doppelganger, Buhari.
In fact, it seems we should also believe that Jubril of Sudan magically multiplied into different demonic entities and in addition to taking over the Presidency, took over the persona of the National Security Adviser(NSA), the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), the Chief of Staff, the Senate President and Speaker of the House and the entire members of Assembly (NASS), as well as the persona of the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Accountant General of the Federation (AGF), the Auditor General (AuGF), the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HoS), the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), the EFCC, ICPC, Police, Defence Intelligence, Banks, Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) and the multitude of replica agencies that drain Nigeria’s budget with no discernible purpose or reasonable accomplishment!
From all accounts, the only entity that raised a red flag was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), which wrote to the National Security Advisor (NSA); at which point the whole scandal exploded. It is instructive that the MFA did not go through the office of the SGF, which is the proper channel for official communication with the Presidency, but bypassed it and routed its concerns through the NSA. That in itself shows that the MFA already suspected the office of the SGF.
More importantly, does that mean that the NSA did not know about the PFIPC until the MFA alerted him? That would be an admission of the failure of intelligence at the highest level of government in Nigeria.
In fact, the explanation given by the Villa Vuvuzela in defence of the Government and the beleaguered Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamilia, is so destructive that it beggars belief that anyone permitted him to issue it, let alone insist on it.
If indeed Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi is a one man fraudster who took over the entire apparatus of government, including the President, as the Villa Vuvuzela claims, then obviously almost everyone from the President downward should all be locked up for criminal dereliction of duty – a dereliction so awful that not only has Nigeria and its citizens been turned into a global laughing stock, the whole country was hijacked by forces unknown and suffered economic and reputational damages so egregious as to warrant charges of treason for several officials in some countries.
If we are to believe the official line, the government has admitted to the total State capture of Nigeria by one man and that we do not, in fact, have a government in office. It is an admission that for an extended period of time, they lost control of Nigeria; and may actually still be the puppets of unknown forces, be they foreign governments, multinational cartels or internal forces that needed an entity as an official cover for laundering unlimited funds under the guise of promoting foreign investment.
The question then arises as to who actually runs Nigeria because obviously, based on the explanation given by the government, the persons masquerading as the Executive, Legislative, Financial, Administrative, Security and Intelligence Arms of government are not in charge.
That is the most frightening aspect of this whole PFIFC horror show.
- Lilian Onoh was Nigeria’s Ambassador to Namibia and former Chargé d’Affaires to Jamaica.
