Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation Babachir Lawal has called for a judicial inquiry into the scandal surrounding an alleged fake presidential agency, saying the matter goes far beyond a simple administrative blunder.
Lawal made the demand in an interview on Monday, arguing that the circumstances surrounding the Presidential Fiscal and Infrastructure Projects Council point to a network of institutional compromise that allowed the agency to operate within government processes despite questions over its legal standing.
“I don’t think it should even be administrative alone; it should be a judicial inquiry,” Lawal told ARISE NEWS.
₦27.5bn Take-Off Grant Raises Questions Over Budget Process
At the center of the fake agency scandal is an alleged ₦27.5 billion take-off grant that Lawal says was disbursed to the council before any budget appropriation was made for it. He questioned how funds of that scale could have left government coffers and entered the account of an organization with no legal framework.
Lawal said the controversy only became public because of a dispute over how the money was shared, not because government oversight mechanisms caught the problem.
“We are just talking about the tip of the iceberg here,” he said. “Before we got to this point, ₦27.5bn had already been disbursed as a take-off grant. How did that money get to them? It was not in the budget.”
He noted that the man at the center of the controversy had himself claimed the dispute arose after he refused to part with 48 percent of that grant to unnamed parties. Lawal said that admission alone raises serious questions about who authorized the release of public funds to an entity with no legal basis.
“Who gave him the money? How did the process of generating the request for release come up? How did it go through?” he asked.
SGF’s Office and Budget Ministry Must Answer for Institutional Failures
Lawal argued that the Office of the SGF bears direct responsibility for the breakdown in oversight. Under normal procedure, he explained, the SGF’s office reviews agency budgets before they reach the National Assembly. Any unlicensed or fictitious body should have been flagged at that stage.
He also pointed to the budget process itself, noting that the Federal Government’s Integrated Financial Management Information System assigns budget codes to recognized ministries, departments, and agencies. For an agency with no legal existence to receive a code, someone within the budget office had to enable it.
“The budget office assigns a budget code according to the chart of accounts in GIFMIS,” Lawal said. “How did they manage to assign a budget code for an agency that does not exist? Who inserted it?”
He described the situation as institutional compromise rather than isolated negligence, suggesting that powerful individuals within the administration protected the agency’s operations.
Lawal also criticized the National Assembly for failing to scrutinize budget proposals line by line. He said most lawmakers are more interested in their salaries and allowances than in performing genuine legislative oversight. He argued this government’s National Assembly has no track record of rigorous budget examination.
“There are some people that when they talk, nobody else has the authority to contravene,” he said, without naming individuals directly.
Lawal Points to Chief of Staff and SGF as Key Figures to Scrutinise
Beyond the agency’s legal status, Lawal said the public should focus on identifying the individuals who enabled the council to function. He argued that the existence of such an organization inside the budget process requires active facilitation from those at the top of government.
He named the chief of staff as a particularly powerful figure in the current administration and said the SGF has failed in his responsibilities. He said nothing has been done to hold anyone accountable despite the scale of the alleged fraud.
“Those are the people we need to expose,” Lawal said. “The SGF is there, just reneging on his responsibilities. And nothing has happened now.”
The federal government had not responded publicly to Lawal’s specific allegations at the time of this report. The Office of the SGF did not issue a statement, and details on any ongoing investigation were not immediately available.
Lawal served as SGF under President Muhammadu Buhari before he was suspended over a separate government contracts controversy in 2017.
