Gbajabiamila and the ConPrince: Tinubu’s Presidency and the limits of denial, by Ugoji Egbujo

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Ugoji Egbujo

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The Presidency wants Nigerians to believe that one Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, single-handedly invented a federal agency, secured a sprawling office at the Federal Secretariat, inserted a budget line, and summoned foreign ambassadors to a meeting at the Wells Carlton Hotel — all through forged documents and some juju in his mouth.

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If Prince Adeyemi possesses such extraordinary powers that he could mesmerise the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Federal Civil Service, the National Assembly, and segments of the diplomatic community, then the real scandal is not his audacity but the astonishing porosity of the Tinubu administration.

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According to the presidency, this serial impostor — who once paraded himself as the head of a fictitious UN-affiliated World Youth Organisation — hoodwinked everyone. He obtained a federal government’s office space, opened bank accounts (including with the CBN), and somehow caused a non-existent entity called the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council to appear in the 2026 federal budget with an allocation of over ¦ 1.3 billion. He then hosted ambassadors and senior officials without anyone in the Foreign Ministry or the National Security Adviser’s office noticing until it was too late.

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As children, we had believed the stories of ghosts our parents told us. Now this Presidency, with its dubious capacity for bedtime stories, expects us to believe it was a helpless victim of one man’s magic. Tinubu’s supposedly sagacious government is now advertising itself as the pitiable target of Prince Adeyemi’s supernatural powers?

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The alternative story is far more damaging, which is why the Presidency is desperate for the public to accept the con-artist narrative. Prince Adeyemi has alleged that Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to the President, sold him a public office for ¦ 600 million, with ¦ 400 million paid upfront. For that princely sum, the Prince should have demanded a position that would vest him with the authority to allocate lands on Abuja. He must have expected more than a fictitious agency. He claims the deal collapsed because of Gbajabiamila’s rapacious sharing formula . The prince asserts that he refused vehemently to surrender a substantial share — reportedly around 48 per cent — of the agency’s ¦ 27.4 billion take-off grant to Gbajabiamila or his proxies.

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Adeyemi insists he was operating with official backing until greed disrupted the arrangement.

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The Presidency, predictably, dismisses this as cheap blackmail by a trapped forger. Yet the question remains: how did a man with a documented history of impersonation secure an office in a federal building, insert a budget line, and convene a meeting with ambassadors before the system caught up with him?

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The timeline offered by the Presidency raises its own questions. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs reportedly wrote to the National Security Adviser on 15 October 2025 complaining about Adeyemi’s unauthorised meeting with ambassadors at the Wells Carlton Hotel. Two days later, on 17 October, Gbajabiamila reportedly blew his famed whistle and asked the Police and DSS to investigate. Adeyemi was arrested on 27 October. Before then, an intermediary who allegedly helped procure documents for him reportedly died in a mysterious hotel fire in Abuja. It’s stranger than fiction.

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After his arrest and release on bail, Adeyemi returned to his office and later went public with his version of events. The Police have charged him with eight counts, including forgery, impersonation, conspiracy, and obtaining by false pretences. The EFCC has stayed away — perhaps still preoccupied with the Betta Edu which it has been investigating for three years.

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Rather than subject this Prince Adeyemi scandal to a thorough public inquiry, the government appears content to let it fizzle out in court. If the Police conducted any serious investigation into how Adeyemi’s “water” entered the “Opi ugboguru” of our national budget, they have not told Nigerians.

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The ambassadors who attended Adeyemi’s meeting will write home with their own conclusions. They must now devise new ways how to distinguish genuine from counterfeit Nigerian officials.

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Nigeria’s international reputation has already been battered by the notorious multitude of letter-writing princes and certificate merchants. The spectacle of another prince allegedly running a sophisticated scheme from within the Presidency itself will not help.

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The story the government is selling is not even the most face-saving option. It would be less damaging to admit that one corrupt official, acting like a modern Judas, collected 400 shekels and sold access to state power than to claim that a lone hustler magically inserted a ghost agency into the federal budget and operated it undetected for over a year. If the government cant be honest , it should at least learn how to cook stories well.

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President Tinubu began his term by changing the national anthem. It is easy to pretend concern about moral decay. Now he hides his head in the sand while a scandal with serious international dimensions swirls under his nose. A government that is unperturbed by corruption cannot redeem this country. A government that treats every scandal as a public relations problem to be managed rather than a governance failure to be uprooted cannot inspire the youths .

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Tinubu needs to wash this scandal in the market square and dry it in the public sun. If rotten heads do not roll, the rot will only fester. A country that cannot distinguish between its real institutions and the elaborate fictions of ambitious men has already lost more than an election. It has lost the capacity to command respect at home and abroad.

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