A defamation storm is brewing at the heart of Nigeria’s presidency, as Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila moves to silence the man who has spent the past two weeks accusing him, in increasingly lurid terms, of everything from bribery to murder.
The Chief of Staff’s lawyers, led by Senior Advocate of Nigeria Kemi Pinheiro, fired off a cease-and-desist letter on Sunday demanding that Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi retract allegations made at a June 25 press conference or face a legal reckoning that could cost him ₦10 billion. The letter gives Adeyemi 72 hours to comply, a clock that, by the time this report was filed, had all but run out.
To understand how a chief of staff ended up threatening a private citizen with a nine-figure lawsuit, it helps to rewind to last October. That’s when police arrested Adeyemi at an office inside Abuja’s Federal Secretariat Complex, where he had reportedly been running an outfit calling itself the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, an agency the Presidency insists never existed.
Investigators allege Adeyemi forged an appointment letter purportedly signed by Gbajabiamila and falsely presented himself as head of the fictitious body, a scheme that only unraveled after officials at the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission and the Foreign Affairs Ministry began asking questions.
He now faces an eight-count charge at the Federal High Court in Abuja: conspiracy, forgery, impersonation, and false personation among them, with the matter due back in court on July 27.
Complicating the presidency’s “it doesn’t exist” defense, however, is an inconvenient paper trail: an entity bearing a near-identical name, the Presidential Economic Advisory Council/Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, actually appears in the signed 2026 Appropriation Act, carrying a budget line of roughly ₦1.3 billion, split between personnel, overhead, and capital costs.
Adeyemi has seized on that detail as vindication, arguing that a body cannot be dismissed as fake if the president’s own signature put money behind it.
Rather than let the courtroom sort it out, Adeyemi took his case to the cameras. At his June 25 press conference, he turned the tables on his accuser, alleging that Gbajabiamila had demanded ₦27.4 billion, 48 percent of the agency’s proposed takeoff grant, and that ₦400 million had already changed hands through a proxy to secure his appointment, with ₦200 million more allegedly still owed.
He didn’t stop there: according to Pinheiro LP’s letter, Adeyemi also accused the chief of staff of bullying journalists, rigging budget processes, misusing security agencies, discharging his duties while intoxicated, and most explosively, of being a murderer and an assassin complicit in a cover-up.
Gbajabiamila’s camp calls all of it fiction. The letter insists the chief of staff has never had any contact whatsoever with Adeyemi and frames the press conference as a deliberate smear timed to a pending criminal trial.
Pinheiro’s team was also pointed in its criticism of Adeyemi’s choice of venue, arguing that serious allegations belonged before investigative or judicial authorities, not a media podium.
The demands laid out in the letter are exhaustive: an immediate halt to further statements, the scrubbing of the press conference and all related clips from every platform Adeyemi controls, and a retraction published with equal prominence in at least five national newspapers and across every social media account used to spread the original claims. Pinheiro LP also wants a signed undertaking that Adeyemi will never raise the allegations again.
Should he refuse, the firm says it will pursue Adeyemi on two fronts simultaneously: a criminal complaint for defamation under FCT law and a civil suit seeking ₦10 billion in aggravated and exemplary damages.
In a touch clearly designed to project magnanimity rather than personal enrichment, the letter notes that any damages awarded would be donated to a charity of Gbajabiamila’s choosing. The lawyers are also seeking a perpetual injunction against future publications and a court order compelling a public apology.
The affair has already drawn in outside voices. A civil society group, the Center for Transparency and Accountability in Governance, has called on the DSS and police to investigate Adeyemi, dismissing his claims as part of a “dangerous pattern of impersonation, misinformation, a cocktail of blackmail, and attempts to undermine public institutions.”
On the other side, human rights lawyer Femi Falana has pushed back against the presidency’s handling of the matter, arguing it lacks the constitutional standing to unilaterally clear anyone’s name in an ongoing case.
For his part, Adeyemi maintains he is the one under threat, telling Premium Times in a recent interview that he has gone underground out of fear for his life, a claim that remains unverified and which the presidency has not addressed.
With the 72-hour deadline expiring and Adeyemi showing no public sign of backing down, the dispute looks set to move from press conferences and lawyers’ letters into the courtroom, layering a defamation battle on top of a forgery trial that was already generating some of the more surreal headlines to come out of Abuja this year.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
The scandal boils down to one central fact: a man already on criminal trial for allegedly forging documents to run a fake government agency has accused the president’s chief of staff of bribery and murder and now faces a ₦10 billion defamation suit for it.
With his 72-hour deadline to retract expired, Adeyemi’s claims remain unproven, Gbajabiamila’s denials remain unproven, and both men’s fates now rest with the courts. Until then, the public should treat the accusations on either side as allegations, not fact.
