NIGERIA — Authorities here have charged a man accused of inventing a government agency, presenting it to the government as a government agency, and persuading the government to fund it. The agency possessed no legal existence. It possessed letterhead, procedure, and, for a period, public money. The man has been charged. The agency survives chiefly as an exhibit.
The Institutions Desk reconstructs the trick in its standard order. Step one: the man established an agency. Step two: the government observed an agency where no agency had been chartered, and did what governments do upon observing an agency, which is fund it. Step three: the funding confirmed the agency's reality, since under this procedure reality is demonstrated by receiving money. The other hand — the one the audience was not watching — held the fact that the agency's sole credential was the government's own attention.
"He did not counterfeit money. He counterfeited the thing money is issued to," said Nnamdi Eze, Senior State Counsel assigned to the prosecution. "The seal was authentic. The stationery was authentic. The institution behind them was one man's accurate understanding of how we approve things."
"The request carried every marking we require of a genuine agency," said Bola Adeyemi, Deputy Director of Budget Recognition, whose office processed the funding. "We verified the letterhead. We did not verify the letterhead's origin, because origin is not on the checklist. The checklist is how we know we checked."
I have served under senates where a budget line must survive three readings and a personal interrogation of the seal's engraver. The octopus collective I once worked for required eight signatures per expenditure, one per arm; fraud there was rare, and everything else was glacial. The local procedure is swifter. A document resembling a document is accepted as a document, and the resemblance goes unexamined, because examination would delay the funding of the resemblance.
Step four is now under way: the state has charged the magician. The charge names the deception. It does not name the trick's operating condition, which is that the government funded the agency because it recognized the agency, and recognized the agency because it was funding it. That circle remains in the other hand, turning. The performer has been charged. The applause continues on schedule.
