Two thoughts came to mind after reading Bayo Onanuga’s lengthy treatise on the supposed fake Presidential Advisory Council. The first was that if one wishes to conceal the truth, there is no better instrument than a long epistle. The second was that the curious existence and non-existence of this Council, which belongs less to politics than to literature, inhabits that strange territory where Franz Kafka and Nikolai Gogol become more reliable guides than constitutional lawyers, public administrators, or government spokespersons. The affair possesses the peculiar quality of surrealism, in which institutions appear to exist and not exist simultaneously, official authority is affirmed and denied in the same breath, and evidence becomes less persuasive than official declarations.

It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre public controversy.

The presidency has declared that the Presidential Advisory Council is a scam, insisting that no such body exists and warning Nigerians against dealing with those claiming to represent it. The official position leaves little room for ambiguity. According to the presidency, the council is fictitious, its operators impostors, and its claims fraudulent.

Ordinarily, such a categorical denial would bring the matter to an end.

Except that it does not.

Standing against that denial is an equally remarkable body of evidence suggesting that the council enjoys precisely the kind of institutional existence the Presidency now insists it never possessed. Public records reportedly indicate that the council found its way into the 2026 Appropriation Bill. There are claims that it operates an account with the Central Bank of Nigeria. The supposed Director General of the Council, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, insists that his appointment came directly from the president’s Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila. The issue, therefore, ceases to be whether one believes one side or the other. The issue becomes something far more troubling. How does an institution that officially does not exist find its way into the machinery of government? 

This is where ordinary political analysis reaches its limits.

Kafka understood such moments better than political commentators ever could. In The Castle, he introduces us to K., a land surveyor who arrives in a village believing he has been officially summoned by the mysterious Castle. Every effort to confirm his appointment leads him deeper into bureaucratic confusion. Officials acknowledge and deny him almost simultaneously. Documents appear, but explain nothing. Procedures multiply while clarity disappears. Authority is unmistakably present, but forever inaccessible. 

No one seems entirely responsible, but everyone acts in its name. The institution exercises immense power precisely because it cannot be clearly located. The Castle, though it never truly resolves the contradiction, simply teaches us that bureaucracy can become detached from reality until its own procedures are the only reality that matters. One cannot read reports surrounding the Presidential Advisory Council without recalling Kafka’s masterpiece. If the Presidency says the Council never existed, but budgetary documents suggest otherwise, if someone publicly claims appointment by the Chief of Staff while the government disowns him, if the Presidential Advisory Council officially declared that it has an account with the banker’s bank, then the presidency is no longer operating within ordinary governance failure; it has entered Kafka’s world.

And Kafka alone is insufficient.

Nikolai Gogol anticipated another dimension of this peculiar spectacle in The Government Inspector. There, the frightened officials of a provincial town mistake an insignificant civil servant, Ivan Alexandrovich Khlestakov, for a powerful government inspector sent from the capital. Panic replaces reason. Every official projects authority onto a man who possesses none. Bribes are freely offered. Lies accumulate. Self-deception becomes institutional policy. The comedy works because nobody bothers to verify reality. 

Appearance acquires greater authority than fact itself. The Presidential Advisory Council controversy appears to reverse Gogol’s plot while preserving its absurdity. Here, instead of officials inventing authority where none exists, we confront the possibility that authority may have been sufficiently institutionalised to acquire the banker’s bank recognition and budgetary allocation, only for its creators to later insist that it never existed at all. The fiction is not merely theatrical; it threatens the integrity of the presidency itself.

This is not an argument about one Council; it is an argument about the nature and character of the Nigerian state.

Government derives legitimacy not simply from elections but from predictability. Citizens must know which institutions exist, who created them, under what legal authority they operate, who supervises them, how they are funded, and to whom they are accountable. Once the government begins to deny institutions apparently reflected in its own official records, the very distinction between legality and fiction begins to collapse. That collapse carries consequences extending far beyond the present controversy. If an advisory body can appear in budgetary allocations without official recognition, serious questions arise concerning the integrity of the appropriation process itself. Who proposed the allocation? Which ministry defended it?

Which committees scrutinised it? Who authorised expenditure? If an account indeed exists at the Central Bank in the Council’s name, fundamental questions emerge. Under what authority was the account opened? What documentation supported its creation? Who approved the necessary administrative procedures? If Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew’s claim that he was appointed by the Chief of Staff is false, then the Presidency owes Nigerians more than a denial. If his claim is true, then the present denials demand an entirely different explanation. One cannot simply wish away these contradictions through public statements. Institutions are established through documents, appropriations, approvals, authorisations, and records. They do not materialise by rumour, nor do they disappear by press release.

Perhaps, the greatest casualty in this affair is public trust. Citizens already struggle to distinguish official information from political propaganda. Every contradiction deepens that uncertainty. Every unexplained inconsistency reinforces the perception that government operates according to rules inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Democracy, however, depends upon precisely the opposite assumption. Government should become more intelligible as transparency increases, not more mysterious.

Kafka warned us about bureaucracies that imprison citizens within invisible systems, and Gogol cautioned about officials who become prisoners of their own pretences. Nigeria now confronts the disturbing possibility that both writers have become unexpectedly contemporary. Somewhere between The Castle and The Government Inspector lies a Presidential Advisory Council that reportedly appears in the national budget, allegedly holds the “Treasury Single Account” with the Central Bank, has a man publicly claiming to have been appointed its Director General, and, officially, does not exist. Such contradictions belong naturally to great literature because literature delights in paradoxes that should never become the operating principles of government. 

When the presidency begins to resemble Kafka and Gogol more than the Constitution, citizens are entitled not merely to confusion but to answers. The Presidency may dismiss the Council as a scam, but until it satisfactorily explains how a non-existent institution appears to have acquired the visible attributes of official existence, the affair will remain not simply unbelievable but profoundly surreal.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette