PFIPC Scandal: Babachir Lawal Demands Explanation For Budget Code

Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal has reacted to a document linking the SGF’s office with the controversial Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC).

According to reports, documents have surfaced indicating 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.

Speaking on the development on Arise News, Lawal 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 identified that before forwarding any request.

“If it is not an agency approved by law, 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? Such will not happen in our time if it does not exist,” he insisted.

Lawal argued that although the President’s spokesperson could make official announcements on behalf of the administration, any correspondence from a federal agency passing through the Office of the SGF should be subjected to due diligence to confirm the agency’s legal status before being forwarded.

“I am sure the president would assume such an entity has gone through all the checks and balances before it is established and therefore not every communication from that agency needs to be verified. “But as far as it is coming through the office of the SGF, due diligence must be done first before it is forwarded,” he said.

Lawal also said that the SGF had been sidelined in a number of government processes, describing the situation as a “institutional compromise” and not just an administrative failure.

“How could a non-existent agency have got a budget code? How could it have gone through so many layers of the budgeting process without being picked up 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 allocate the budget code for this agency that doesn’t exist? Who put it in?

“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 in our time call every MDA 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 came about because he refused to part with 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 lent 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%. Whose money was it? Where did the generation of the request for release come from? How did it get in?

“We are talking about the tip of the iceberg here. He said 27.5 billion Naira had already been disbursed down there, before we got to here, as a take-off grant. How had that money come to him? It wasn’t in the budget. This is what should frighten us. We only now begin to see it when we are quarreling how did it get into the budget. If such money can go to a fictitious organization, How did that money get to them?