The Presidency says this council does not exist. The budget Tinubu signed gives it a code and names it three times

INEC’s own final list of candidates for the 2027 presidential election - not a newspaper’s reprint of it, but the signed commission document, which we downloaded from inecnigeria.org and read - carries this candidacy on page 2 of three. The entry is printed surname first, as "TINUBU BOLA AHMED", against APC, age 74, with SHETTIMA KASHIM (59) as running mate. The qualifications filed with the commission are given as B.Sc. The list is signed on every page by Rose Oriaran-Anthony, Secretary of the Commission. It names eighteen presidential candidates, two more than most published summaries of the field.

Rather than take the figure from anyone’s reporting, we opened the document. The signed 2026 Appropriation Act runs to 2,635 pages; we searched the full text for the amount, for the council’s name and for the acronym, and then scanned every page of the PDF to be sure nothing had been missed. The name appears on exactly three pages. The acronym PFIPC appears nowhere in the Act at all.

The first is printed page 1 of the Presidency schedule, the table headed NO / CODE / MDA / PERSONNEL / OVERHEAD / CAPITAL / TOTAL ALLOCATION. Entry 18 of 18, immediately after the National Council on Climate Change, reads: code 0111062001, "PRESIDENTIAL ECONOMIC ADVISORY COUNCIL/PRESIDENTIALL FOREIGN INTERVENTION PROMOTION COUNCIL" - the doubled L is the Act’s own - with 802,978,783 personnel, 200,000,001 overhead, 300,000,000 capital, and a total allocation of 1,302,978,784.

That line requires us to correct something. The figure has been reported, and we repeated it, as the budget of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council. It is not. The Act assigns N1,302,978,784 to one code carrying two names, and nowhere in the schedules we read does it divide the money between the Presidential Economic Advisory Council and the council beside it. Anyone quoting that figure as the second council’s budget - us included, until we opened the file - is quoting a shared vote.

What survives the correction is the harder fact, and it is now a fact we can show rather than one we relay. The Presidency has described the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council as fake and non-existent, and accused an individual of running a fictitious presidential body under that title. The Act the President assented to gives that title a place in the Presidency’s own list of ministries, departments and agencies, an MDA code of its own, and a share of a nine-figure vote. Whatever the correct account of the council is, the enacted budget is not consistent with the word non-existent.

The detail schedules carry it further. Printed page 33 opens the vote for 0111062001 and breaks the personnel figure down: salary 573,260,187 and allowances and social contributions 229,718,596. A salary line of that size is not a dormant heading; it is a payroll. Printed page 34 closes the vote at total recurrent 1,002,978,784, total capital 300,000,000, total allocation 1,302,978,784.

The capital side is a single head - research and development, under acquisition of non-tangible assets - and its named projects, every one of them marked NEW, are courses and a conference. Logistics for hosting a World Investment Summit 2026 takes N182,500,000. The rest are training: the Harvard Program on Negotiation at N17,000,000, an intensive World Trade Organization course on trade negotiation skills at N17,000,000, certified investment management analyst training at N10,000,000, advanced negotiation strategies at N10,000,000, and several more in the same register. It is a line about sending people on negotiation courses and hosting a summit, not about foreign intervention.

Around that budget line sit two letters we have not handled, and here we are relying on reporting rather than on the documents themselves. In September 2025 two arms of the National Assembly are reported to have written formally to the council’s Director-General: the Senate Committee on Anti-Corruption on 2 September, the House Committee on Treaties, Protocols and Agreements on 3 September. If those letters are as described, then a body the Presidency calls non-existent has a code in the budget, a payroll line, and correspondence from two parliamentary committees addressed to its chief executive.

One document would resolve the part that remains open, and it is a narrow ask: the Budget Office worksheet behind code 0111062001, showing how the N1,302,978,784 divides between the two councils named on that line and which of them carries the salaries. The Act is signed, public and checkable - anyone can pull the same file and turn to printed page 1 of the Presidency schedule. What the Act cannot tell us is which council the money is actually for.

What this rests on

The candidacy, the printed name, the age, the running mate and the filed qualifications rest on INEC’s own signed final list, read on the page. The Act itself, opened and searched page by page rather than quoted from reporting. Every figure above was read off the schedules; the three pages carrying the council’s name were found by scanning all 2,635. The two National Assembly committee letters are the exception and rest on press reporting, not on documents we hold.

What this does not establish

It does not establish that the council is legitimate, that any money was released or spent, or that anyone committed a crime. It does not establish how the shared N1,302,978,784 divides between the two councils on the line - the Act never splits it. It does not establish that the Presidency’s denial was made in bad faith; a wrongly drafted budget line and a truthful denial are compatible. We have not seen the two committee letters ourselves. We did not re-download the Act from budgetoffice.gov.ng during this reading, so we publish its hash instead and invite readers to compare.