Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal has responded to a document linking the SGF’s office with the controversial Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC).
Documents have emerged showing that the Office of the SGF authorised the self-styled Director-General of the PFIPC, Adeniyi Adeyemi, to go to the Canada-Africa Fintech Summit in August 2025, reports say.
Lawal speaking on the development on Arise News said such correspondence should not have been processed if the agency had no legal approval.
He said if an agency was not officially in existence, the office of the SGF would have known before forwarding any request.
“If it is not a legally approved agency then it should not have come up in the first place. It shouldn’t be there. And the SGF would know that if it does not exist on any basis why is he forwarding a request? He insisted that if it does not exist “such will not happen in our time.
Lawal said that while the President’s spokesperson could make official pronouncements on behalf of the administration, correspondences from a federal agency that came through the Office of the SGF should be subjected to due diligence to ascertain the agency’s legal status before being transmitted.
“I am sure the president would assume that such an entity has been subjected to all the checks and balances before it is established and therefore not every communication from that agency needs to be verified. “But as it comes through the office of the SGF, it must be first subjected to due diligence before it is forwarded,” he said.
Lawal also said that the SGF had been pushed aside in a number of government processes, describing it as a “institutional compromise” and not just an administrative failure.
“How come a non-existent agency got a budget code? How come it went through so many layers of the budgeting process without being caught by the relevant institutions?” he asked.
“It’s institutional compromise because I sense there’s quite a big racket going on somewhere along the line. If the agency is created by maybe one big man alone, and then he wants to go through the budget process, the budget office assigns the budget code according to the chart of accounts in GIFMIS. So how did they manage to earmark the budget code for this non-existent agency? Who put it there?
“Because first of all, the budget office will issue a budget call circular to the MDAs and everybody will start preparing his budget according to the budget line. They give you ceilings and you prepare your budget and send it to the budget office as an agency or ministry. Now, the Ministry of Budget and Planning would call on each MDA in our time to come and defend its budget. Now, if you don’t exist, how did they know that you are a real entity? “Who gave the budget code and allowed their budget to go through?” he asked.
He said, “Nigerians are talking about how 1.3 billion Naira was inserted into the budget. The man himself first said the quarrel started because he refused to give away 48% of the 27 point something billion Naira take-off grant. That money has been spent before this budget office was looking for the budget. Who’d given him the money? It was not appropriated for. It is not in any budget. That 27.5 billion Naira for which he says somebody demanded 48%. Who was the money from? Where did the generation of the request for release come from ? How did it get through?
We are talking about the tip of the iceberg here. He said that 27.5 billion Naira had already been given out there before we came, as a take-off grant. Where did that money come from? It was not budgeted for. This is what should scare us. We only start to see it when we are fighting how did it get into the budget. If that kind of money can go to a make-believe organization, Where did that money come from?
