An Open Letter to the Tinubu Supporters: This Is Not 2023
By Kio Amachree, Letters from Stockholm
Dear Tinubu supporters,
I write to you not in anger but in clarity. You have spent three years telling Nigerians that the Chicago story is old news, settled gossip, the recycled rumour of bitter losers. In 2023 that line worked, because in 2023 most Nigerians had only heard whispers. They had not seen a case number. They had not read a sworn declaration. They had not watched a sitting president's lawyers file sixteen pages in a Washington courtroom to keep his own file locked away.
This is a completely different stage, and you know it.
Let me state the record plainly, as record and not as rumour. In 1993 the United States government seized four hundred and sixty thousand dollars from bank accounts in Bola Ahmed Tinubu's name in Chicago, in a civil forfeiture case, number 93 C 4483, tied by the government's own filings to a heroin trafficking investigation. He did not contest it. He let the money go. On 28 August 2026 the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed in a sworn declaration before Judge Beryl Howell that it had investigated him. That same day his lawyers filed to block the release of the records. Those are facts on a federal docket in Washington, not the imaginings of a diaspora malcontent. A forfeiture settlement is not a criminal conviction, and I say so every time I write. But a man who fights this hard to seal a file is not behaving like a man with nothing in it.
In 2023 you could call all this hearsay. In 2026 it is a live case before one of the most incorruptible judges on the American federal bench. Judge Howell cannot be bought, cannot be leaned on, and cannot be shouted down from Abuja. Nobody in the Villa can call her. That is why the opposition, and people like me who have no party and no ambition but the truth, took this fight out of Nigeria in the first place. Your police, your DSS, your pliable courts and your paid commentators have no jurisdiction on Constitution Avenue.
And here is the second thing that has changed. Nigerians are no longer merely curious. They are angry. Your man had his chance. He was handed the most powerful office in Africa and told the country to make sacrifices. Nigerians made them. Fuel went up, the naira collapsed, food became a luxury, and the people who were told to be patient watched the people around power get richer. There is no achievement you can name that outweighs what ordinary Nigerians have lost since May 2023. He had his chance and he has blown it, and every Nigerian standing in a queue or skipping a meal knows it. The Chicago file lands on ground that is already burning.
The third thing that has changed is Washington. For years America's agencies had an easy choice: protect the man quietly and say nothing. That option is gone. Judge Howell has ordered them to account, the FBI has admitted the investigation under oath, and the entire world is watching what they do next. The Americans now face a dilemma they have never faced over Nigeria before. They can keep shielding a compromised man, or they can keep the trust of two hundred and thirty million Nigerians who will remember which side they chose. Whatever I believe about why they protected him, and I have written about that at length, the choice in front of them is now public. That is new.
So dance around the fire as much as you like. Call me mumu. Call me a Stockholm armchair critic, an Eton boy, a bitter old aristocrat, whatever makes you feel important in the group chat. I have been called worse by better people. I was around power in this country before many of you were born, I swore an oath to myself during the Shagari years about what I would do if the looters ever came back, and I am keeping it.
But hear me clearly on this, because it is a promise and not a threat. Your time is coming to an end, one way or the other. Either the files come out and the truth does the work, or 2027 comes and the ballot does the work. Either way, the accounting will follow. Not mob justice, not vengeance in the streets, but lawful accountability, through courts, through commissions of inquiry, through the kind of due process you denied to everyone else. Those who defended, enabled, laundered and lied for this administration will be asked, on the record, what they knew and when. Such is the anger in the land that no one will be able to say afterwards that they were only following the party line.
You still have a choice. You can keep insulting your fellow citizens on behalf of a man who will not even let them read his file, or you can start asking the question every honest Nigerian is already asking: if there is nothing there, why is he fighting so hard to hide it?
Nigeria belongs to Nigerians.
Kio Amachree
Founder and President, Worldview International
Stockholm
Disclaimer: References to the 1993 Chicago proceedings concern a civil forfeiture action which was settled without any criminal charge or conviction. All other characterisations are the author's opinion based on the public court record in Greenspan v. FBI/DEA and publicly reported statements.
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