By Kelechi Deca
“Our ancestors said that if you are bathing and a mad man comes to take your clothes and runs away, would you come out naked and start pursuing the mad man, creating a confusing spectacle of indistinguishable scenario, or would you remain inside and think of a better approach.”
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You may have heard about the old adage popularised by British politician Denis Healey, but you may not be aware that it is known as the “First Law of Holes”.
The law states that when you are already inside a hole, you should stop digging.
People might think this is commonsensical enough but in a world driven by attention economics, people do all sorts of self deprecating things and invariably ends up self-dehumanising.
This timeless wisdom offers critical counsel to the Presidency’s defenders amidst the unfolding scandal of the so-called “fake agency,” the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) .
This practical metaphor simply advises that when you are in a bad situation, you should immediately cease actions that make it worse.
It is interesting that not a single individual is carrying placards on behalf of the DG, of a nonexistent “fake” agency. No single individual, not even from his village has come out to vouch for him.
Maybe they have but I have not read it. That succinctly captures an anecdote of hopelessness in Igbo where one is faced with “degraded palmfruits, and a pounding mortar with a hole.” This is why the issues are not about him.
Ordinarily, one would think that some of the most unbending supporters of this administration would help the government in being sensible enough to combat the “Sunk Cost Fallacy” that is starring them at the face over Adeyemigate.
Instead they are daily insulting our collective intelligence (I hope there’s something like that) by their unmitigated efforts at continuing with such a less optimal strategy simply because they want to be seen to stand by the government.
While that has its personal rewards obviously, it also makes their jobs harder. With every line of defense they dish out, five fresh questions they cannot answer because they don’t know, and this invariably opens more flanks, pooh-poohing their efforts as school boys propaganda l, thus bringing them to more ridicule.
Unfortunately, the deep psychological need to appear consistent and avoid cognitive dissonance is projecting the childishness of their defences.They’re stuck, but they won’t stop because stopping feels like a failure or an admission that they have been wrong all along.
They avoided the central question of how a phantom agency, one the Presidency insists never existed, was able to secure a space at the Federal Secretaria, a ₦1.3 billion allocation in the 2026 budget, a gov.ng website portal, a TSA, and operate accounts with the Central Bank of Nigeria.
They now fly the excuse that the “nonexistent” agency was actually not a creation of the present administration.
That the “fake” agency may have been in existence before this administration, thereby partially admitting that it exists. Intriguingly the same agency has been receiving allocations from the federation budget in the last five years. So why was the need for a new letter of appointment if the agency existed before this administration?
For now, let’s leave Buhari out of this. Buhari’s Minister hired a plane, designed a sticker on the plane and used it to launch a national airline which almost everyone in the present administration and their supporters counted a major achievement of the APC. So let’s leave Buhari out of this.
We should focus on the fact that this isn’t a minor administrative glitch; it suggests a catastrophic failure of governance, or a monumental collaborative effort at corrupt enrichment by people in the administration.
Instead of confronting these systemic questions, they are intensifying their efforts to exonerate the Presidency. Should we then hold the NURTW accountable for this because such defensive digging is a strategic error.
The more one digs to deflect blame, the deeper the credibility hole becomes. Atiku Abubakar aptly captured it by asking: if the PFIPC was a fraud, “who prepared the budget estimates? Which ministry submitted them? Which officials defended them? … And ultimately, who signed that budget into law?”
And mind you, according to Mr. Bayo Onanuga, the DG was arrested in October 2025 after series of petitions and reports were made to the DSS and the Police, yet an agency under such serious investigations got budgetary allocations five months later signed off by the same Presidency that alerted security agencies about the fraudulent agency.
These are not questions that can be buried. Each denial or deflection used to shield the administration from responsibility simply invites more scrutiny and confirms the public’s suspicion that the government is, as Atiku suggested, “held hostage by fraudsters” operating within its own institutions .
Can this offer opportunity to forensically look at our budgets item by item, line by line because something fishy is going on there?
It is time to put down the shovel. The only way out is to allow an independent, transparent investigation, no matter where it leads.
The government’s job is to provide clear answers, clear the air without prejudice and not to dig further into a hole that jeopardises our national integrity.
Stop behaving that we’re all stewpid so we don’t have to remind you that we’re not.