A News Analysis
When the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC, walked out of the State House briefing room and declared the National Brands Development and Made-in-Nigeria Special Project Office a “fake federal agency,” the machinery of executive action moved with unusual speed.
Within hours, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had suspended three permanent secretaries and ordered the arrest of the office’s National Coordinator, Prince George Buchi Nwabueze, the executive director of the agency. Â A media frenzy began: another phantom agency, uncovered; senior civil servants, exposed; a President, decisive.
But as the dust settles, a more complicated picture is emerging — one in which the documentary trail, the institutional history, and the missing links in the ICPC’s own account raise questions that the initial narrative does not comfortably answer.
The Sequence of Events
The controversy erupted when ICPC Chairman Dr Musa Aliyu briefed State House correspondents in Abuja Friday, identifying the Made-in-Nigeria Special Project Office as one of the outfits uncovered during the Commission’s investigation into the alleged fictitious Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council. According to Aliyu, the office had been allocated space within the OSGF premises “without presidential authorisation,” and Nwabueze — allegedly operating under different variations of his name — had the backing of “senior public servants” in the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, OSGF.
The presidential response was immediate. Three permanent secretaries were suspended Richard Pheelangwah, currently Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, who previously served as Perm Sec, Political and Economic Affairs at the OSGF; Mohamed Sanusi Danjuma, now Perm Sec, Special Duties, at the Ministry of Finance, who earlier served as Perm Sec, Special Services Office, at the OSGF; and Nadungu Gagare, currently at the Ministry of Communications. He was Perm Sec, Political and Economic Affairs, OSGF, at the time he signed Nwabueze’s appointment letter.
Nwabueze’s Counter-NarrativeÂ
Rather than retreat into silence, Nwabueze has done something unusual for a public official accused of fraud: he has posted his paper trail online.
On LinkedIn, he published an appointment letter dated 3 October 2025, referenced OSGF/MIN/59310/11/205, signed by Permanent Secretary Nadungu Gagare. The letter formally conveyed “the approval of your appointment as National Coordinator/ Executive Director of the Made in Nigeria Project Office under the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation.”
It specified a five-year renewable tenure beginning July 2025, listed his responsibilities in detail, and stated that the project would operate temporarily from Room B53, Ground Floor, within the OSGF complex. The letter closed with a telling phrase: “this appointment is at the pleasure of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, and in line with the objectives of the Made in Nigeria initiative under the Renewed Hope Agenda.” Clearly, this is not an appointment made by President Bola Tinubu!
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Nwabueze followed that disclosure with a second document — a proposal dated 17 April 2025, referenced PS-PEAO/2025/008/4, also signed by Gagare, addressed to the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, requesting that the initiative be granted Special Project status. That proposal, by its very existence, is significant: an office petitioning for elevated status is, by implication, an office already operating within the institutional architecture it seeks recognition from.
To this, Nwabueze added a claim of longevity: “A programme that has been in the SGF’s office since 16 July 2010 was just discovered yesterday. After 16 years; Nigeria is a funny country.” If accurate, that timeline places the office’s origin under President Goodluck Jonathan, its continuation under President Muhammadu Buhari, and its present iteration under President Tinubu — three administrations, none of which, on Nwabueze’s telling, treated the office as fictitious.
The Nasarawa Endorsement
Perhaps the most awkward piece of the counter-narrative is the public engagement in Nasarawa State involving Governor Abdullahi Sule. In a report shared on the organisation’s LinkedIn page, Sule was quoted as confirming that his state had “domesticated” the Federal Government’s Made-in-Nigeria initiative and captured it in its 2026 budget.
“For us in Nasarawa State, we have since domesticated this initiative of the Federal Government in our solemn commitment to promote local contents and have value for resources abound in our dear state,” the governor was quoted as saying. “I’m happy to inform you that we did not only domesticate this project, but we also accord special attention to its operationalisation by including it in our 2026 budget.”
A sitting state governor budgeting for what a federal anti-corruption agency has now labelled a fake outfit is not the sort of overlap that resolves itself into a clean narrative. Either Sule was misled, or the office he engaged with was engaged with him in a manner that did not appear fictitious at the time. Neither reading favours the ICPC’s version of events.
What the ICPC Has Not Said
For an institution that has moved this decisively, the ICPC has been notably quiet on the middle links of the chain. Several key questions remain unanswered:
Did Gagare act alone? The appointment letter was signed by a permanent secretary. In the ordinary flow of Nigerian bureaucratic practice, a perm sec conveying an appointment does so on the instructions of a superior — in this case, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator George Akume. The ICPC has not clarified whether the SGF authorised, was aware of, or was blindsided by the appointment. That omission is not incidental; it is the crux of whether this is a story about rogue civil servants or a story about a policy the Presidency is now walking back.
Did the ICPC examine the 2010 origin claim? If the office has genuinely existed for 16 years, its “discovery” is less a revelation than a reclassification. The Commission has not publicly addressed whether it examined records from prior administrations or interviewed officials who served in the OSGF under Presidents Jonathan and Buhari.
Was the appointment letter examined? If genuine, it undermines the “no presidential authorisation” theory by demonstrating institutional authorisation at the permanent-secretary level. If forged, that itself would be a specific and prosecutable crime — but the ICPC has not alleged forgery.
The Institutional Backdrop
The Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation houses six permanent secretaries, two of whose portfolios sit at the centre of this controversy: the Perm Sec, Political and Economic Affairs Office — responsible for advising on economic issues and coordinating political policy implementation — and the Perm Sec, Special Services Office, which handles the formulation and implementation of government security policies
Two other silences are worth noting.
An OSGF staff member, speaking to Sunday PUNCH, described the project office as having been “shut for months” and “under investigation” — not, notably, as never having existed. That framing, if accurate, positions the office as one that was operational, then paused, then reclassified — a quite different trajectory from the “fake agency” descriptor.
Reading the Politics
Several plausible readings of the controversy are now in play:
The ICPC’s reading: A group of senior civil servants, taking advantage of procedural weaknesses in the public service, quietly built an unauthorised outfit inside the OSGF and gave it a plausible bureaucratic veneer. The President, once briefed, acted swiftly to shut it down.
Nwabueze’s reading: A legitimate project office, in existence since 2010, operating under the supervision of the OSGF, was suddenly redefined as fake without regard to its documentary history — with the permanent secretaries who administered it caught in the political fallout.
A third reading — the one the ICPC has not addressed: An office of ambiguous but tolerated status, whose institutional footprint quietly expanded over years, and whose reclassification has now been driven less by fresh evidence of criminality than by the political imperative of the PFIPC investigation. In that reading, the permanent secretaries are neither villains nor heroes — they are the collateral of a housecleaning whose upper limits have not yet been defined.
None of these readings can be conclusively adopted on the current record.
The immediate procedural questions are three.
First, will the ICPC publish the documentary basis for its “fake agency” designation, including its treatment of Nwabueze’s appointment letter and the 2010 origin claim? Second, will the SGF’s Office speak on the record about whether Senator Akume authorised, ratified, or was unaware of the appointment? Third, will the suspensions be converted into formal administrative inquiries with defined charges, or will they remain open-ended pending an investigation whose timeline has not been publicly disclosed?
The suspended permanent secretaries now occupy a peculiar limbo: sanctioned in their present ministries for alleged conduct in past ones, with no public charge sheet and no stated timeline for adjudication. Nwabueze, for his part, has continued to release documents, declined further comment to reporters, and awaits an arrest whose operational execution has not yet begun.
The Larger Question
Underneath the specifics of this controversy sits a broader tension in the Tinubu administration’s anti-corruption posture: the tension between the political value of decisive action and the institutional value of due process. The former yields headlines. The latter yields convictions. The two are not always aligned, and this case, more than most, illustrates the cost of confusing one for the other.
If the ICPC is right, the Presidency will have moved swiftly against a genuine fraud, and the documentary trail Nwabueze has produced will collapse under investigative scrutiny. If Nwabueze is right, three career civil servants will have paid a professional price for a decision that either originated above them or reflected an office whose ambiguity was widely tolerated until it suddenly wasn’t.
Either outcome is possible. Neither has yet been established. And in the space between the ICPC’s briefing and the evidence that will one day either vindicate or contradict it, the Made-in-Nigeria Special Project Office has become less a story about a fake agency than a story about how the Nigerian state decides, in real time, what is real.
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