THE MAN WHO BOUGHT A NAME, SOLD A NATION, AND PRAYS TO THE DARK FOR MERCY
From South Chicago Drug Money to Aso Rock: The Unraveling of Nigeria’s Most Elaborate Confidence Trick
Death comes to all of us. I have made my peace with that. More Nigerians die every single day driving down the Ibadan expressway than have ever died writing the truth about Bola Tinubu, and I intend to keep writing. So when people tell me to be careful, to watch my back, to lower my voice — I want them to understand something clearly: I do not fear this man. I feel contempt for him. Disgust when I read his files. Loathing when I measure the devastation he has visited upon one of the greatest nations on earth.
It is Tinubu who fears death. Not me.
He is the one with the juju amulets. He is the one paying babalawo to read his fortune and occultists to whisper invincibility into his aging ears. Here is a man who presents himself to the world as a Muslim — and runs to the darkest corners of the spirit world to beg for protection. That is not faith. That is terror. The terror of a man who knows exactly what he has done and knows, with absolute certainty, that accounts are being kept somewhere.
Let us be honest about what Bola Tinubu actually is. The name is not his. The biography is not his. The legend of the great Lagosian strategist, the political heavyweight, the kingmaker — that is a purchased narrative, a very expensive and very well-orchestrated public relations operation built on the proceeds of drug money laundered through an accountancy firm in Lagos. Listen to the man speak. Listen carefully. What you hear is not greatness. What you hear is an embarrassing shipwreck — a man propped up by medication and Parisian medical care, talking absolute nonsense, saying nothing that coheres, nothing that inspires, nothing that reflects the remotest understanding of the country he claims to lead. And yet the sycophants applaud. The lawyers keep his files sealed. And Nigeria bleeds.
I have lived long enough and traveled far enough to know that this is not governance. This is occupation.
Bandits are massing outside Abuja. Terrorists are moving south every day, taking roads, taking towns, killing and maiming Nigerians with a confidence that tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Nigerian state. The so-called Commander-in-Chief, meanwhile, is busy raiding opposition offices, arresting activists, and standing by while rogue policemen shoot dead civilians on camera for the entire world to witness. This is where thirteen billion dollars in no-bid infrastructure contracts going to a convicted Lebanese money launderer who lives in Paris has brought us. Gilbert Chagoury does not employ Nigerians in senior positions within his companies. He does not live among the people whose country he is being handed. He is a foreign criminal enriched by a Nigerian president who was himself caught laundering drug money in the United States in 1993 — and was nonetheless allowed to leave.
That question has never been properly answered. Why was he allowed to leave?
I will tell you what I believe. I believe Bola Tinubu is a CIA asset. I believe he has been feeding information to American intelligence services for over thirty years. I believe that is the arrangement that explains everything — the sealed files, the deferred prosecution, the cash apartment purchases in Brooklyn by an unemployed daughter that drew not a single question from the FBI, the IRS, or any American law enforcement body nominally charged with asking exactly those questions. That is not incompetence. That is a protected arrangement. And 250 million Nigerians are paying the price of it every single day.
President Macron should take note. Whatever Nigeria has been handed to France under this administration will be revoked. Every concession, every arrangement, every quiet transfer — temporary. Nigeria is not Françafrique. What France did to its African colonies it will not do to Nigeria. When this administration is gone — whether by the ballot, by the courts, by the weight of its own corruption, or by the hand of God — the ledger will be reopened and every page examined.
Tinubu believes he has won. He believes that a nobody from nowhere who rose to the summit of Nigerian power through crime has proved that crime pays. He wants to live forever. He has surrounded himself with people paid to tell him he is untouchable. But I would remind him — and everyone who has attached their fortunes to his — of a man named Adolf Hitler. Hitler believed he was protected by fate. He survived forty-eight assassination attempts. He had Himmler’s astronomers and Goebbels’ propaganda machine and the full terror apparatus of the Third Reich at his disposal. He promised a thousand-year Reich. He died by his own hand in a bunker. The occult charts did not save him. The amulets will not save Tinubu.
The FBI and DEA that Tinubu navigated in 1993 are not the same institutions that exist today. The personnel have changed. The political winds have shifted. The FOIA orders have been granted. Judge Beryl Howell has spoken. Those files are coming. And when they arrive, what they will reveal is not just the story of one corrupt man — they will tell the story of how Nigeria was sold, by whom, to whom, and for what price.
The ghosts of South Chicago are patient. White heroin killed a great many people in those neighborhoods where Tinubu and his associates operated. Those lives are not forgotten. They haunt him. No amount of amulets, no army of praise-singers, no sealed court file will silence them permanently.
My ancestors are not asleep. God still loves Nigeria. We are living through a serious glitch in the matrix — Tinubu is a mistake, and I intend to be part of how that mistake is corrected. The next time any of us gets into a car anywhere in Nigeria it could be our last journey. That is the reality of the country this man has presided over. But living in fear will not protect you when your time comes. What protects you is clarity of purpose, diligence, and the courage to say plainly what everyone already knows.
I have had a productive and interesting life. I pray that continues. But if it does not — it does not. What I will not do is go quietly. What I will not do is pretend.
Bola Tinubu is a fiction. Nigeria is real. And reality, in the end, always wins.
Kio Amachree is President of Worldview International and writes on Nigerian governance and accountability.
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