AN OPEN LETTER TO THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE SECURITY OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA
From: Kio Amachree, President, Worldview International
I am going to ask you one question and I want an answer.
Why are you taking orders from Seyi Tinubu?
That is the question. That is the only question. And I am asking it publicly because I am done being polite about it.
I write as the son of Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC — Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General, the man to whom the British Crown handed the Office of Attorney-General at independence, Acting Attorney-General of this Federation, the first Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Justice, Queens Counsel, first African Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Attorney-General of British Cameroons. He built, from the ground up, the legal architecture within which your institution now operates. Every statute, every charter, every principle of due process your officers invoke when they drag citizens from their homes without charge — he constructed that framework. You cannot name anyone who stands higher than that in the founding of this republic’s justice system. And every one of you knows it.
My uncle Chief Horsfall ran the SSS and the NSO. My cousin Dennis Amachree served within your institution. My father’s brother-in-law, the distinguished Nabo Graham Douglas, served as Attorney-General of the Federation. My family did not observe the Nigerian security and justice apparatus from a distance. We built it. We ran it. We gave it its conscience.
So I ask you directly: what has my family done to be treated as the enemy?
And the dead are behind me demanding the same answer.
Seyi Tinubu holds no elected office. He holds no constitutional mandate. He has never stood before the Nigerian people and asked for their trust, their authority, or their vote. He is the son of a president. That is the entirety of his public qualification. And yet the evidence before Nigeria — now entered into the Federal High Court in Abuja, Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/966/2025 — is that your operatives abducted, detained, and subjected a student leader to beatings, torture and psychological terror because he refused a ₦100 million bribe offered in Seyi Tinubu’s name. The respondents named in that suit are your Director-General, Adeola Oluwatosin Ajayi, the Director of the Nigerian Television Authority, and Seyi Tinubu. That is the public record. That is what Nigeria and the world are reading.
Comrade Atiku Abubakar Isah, President of the National Association of Nigerian Students, said no to that bribe. He exercised his democratic right as a citizen. And your officers — men who swore an oath to defend the Constitution of the Federal Republic — apparently determined that a civilian’s refusal to be bought by the President’s son was an actionable offence. Abduction. Detention without charge. Beatings. Stabbing. Threats on his life. Stripped naked before officials of a state broadcaster. This is what is in that court filing. This is what you are defending.
Now let me remind you of what you once were.
Nuhu Ribadu, Executive Chairman of the EFCC, ran a sting operation in 2004 to arrest Gilbert Chagoury and seize his private jet as Chagoury attempted to re-enter Nigeria — the country he had been forced to flee after Abacha’s death. Ribadu told the story himself, with regret — how Chagoury was tipped off, how that jet took off the moment it touched down, how the man he called the lynchpin of the Abacha looting machine slipped through the net because someone made a phone call. A Swiss court had already convicted Chagoury for money laundering. He paid a fine and returned an estimated $300 million to the Nigerian state to keep himself out of prison. He was placed on the FBI terrorism screening database. The United States put him on a no-fly list. The U.S. Department of Justice named him in a deferred prosecution agreement. He was investigated for financing Hezbollah.
The same Hezbollah whose operatives Nigerian security forces arrested in Kano in 2013. Your own Kano State Director of State Security, Bassey Etang, stood before the press and confirmed it. Anti-tank mines. Rocket-propelled grenades. Seventeen AK-47s. Over eleven thousand rounds of ammunition. An underground bunker cut into the floor of a master bedroom. Suspects who confessed to Hezbollah membership and training. Your military spokesman Captain Ikedichi Iweha stated on the record that those weapons were targeted at Israeli and Western interests inside Nigeria.
That is what is in the north. That is the documented, confirmed, on-the-record threat.
And what is the DSS busy doing today? Arresting journalists under the Cybercrime Act. Detaining students. Running errands for a man who holds no office and has no mandate.
Meanwhile terrorists are beheading civilians. Two-year-old children are being kidnapped alongside their parents. The north is burning. And Adeola Ajayi, Director-General of State Security, is the first respondent in a Federal High Court lawsuit brought by a student he allegedly had abducted for saying no to a bribe.
Today the man your predecessors hunted — Gilbert Chagoury, Swiss-convicted money launderer, FBI-listed, Hezbollah-investigated, DOJ-prosecuted — is saluted. His group holds billions in no-bid contracts from the Tinubu government. His son sits on boards with Seyi Tinubu. And the institution that once had the integrity to chase his jet down a runway now apparently takes its instructions from that same man’s political patron’s unelected son.
Do any of you actually know Bola Tinubu’s real name? Do you know who his parents were? Do you know what he actually is and what he has done to this country? Because I do. And I am publishing every document. Every court record. Every federal filing. Every deferred prosecution agreement. Every Swiss verdict. Every FBI listing. All of it — before Nigeria, before the international community, before history.
I have broken bread with your chiefs from Shinkaffi down. I have played polo with men of your institution. I am not a stranger to you and you are not a stranger to me. I come from the family that gave this republic its legal conscience and its first institutions of justice.
So I am asking you one last time, on the record, in public, before God and before the ancestors who built what you are now dismantling:
Why are you taking orders from Seyi Tinubu?
The dead are asking. Nigeria is asking. I am asking.
And I will not stop.
Kio Amachree
President, Worldview International
Stockholm, Sweden
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