By Kio Amachree
There is a question that honest Nigerians must now ask — loudly, in public, without apology. It is not a complicated question. It does not require a law degree or a doctorate in political science. It requires only what the Yoruba elders themselves once prized above all things: common sense.
The question is this: Why?
Why would any sane, logical, self-respecting Nigerian — any person with functioning eyes and a conscience still have attached to their chest — continue to support Bola Ahmed Tinubu?
Let us be precise. We are not speaking in abstractions. We are speaking about a specific man, with specific allegations, specific court records, specific contracts, and specific friends. A man whose entire biography is a construction. A man about whom the most basic facts of human existence — his mother, his father, his real name, his date of birth, his place of schooling — remain, to this day, either falsified, disputed, or simply unknown.
His own documents submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission claimed he attended Government College, Lagos, and presented a 1970 GCE A-Level result. The problem — embarrassing, inescapable, damning — is that Government College, Lagos, was not established until 1974.
The school did not exist. The certificate cannot have been genuine. And yet the man who signed those documents is today the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Court records from a Chicago case establish that in the early 1990s, Tinubu was linked to bank accounts alleged to have been used to launder money for a heroin trafficking ring. In 1993, he agreed to forfeit assets to U.S. authorities, sidestepping a potential trial on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Not rumour. Not opposition propaganda. American federal court documents. The kind that do not disappear, no matter how many Aso Rock press releases are issued.
And yet his supporters — governors, senators, ministers, traditional rulers, pastors, imams, businessmen, and ordinary market traders — are today falling over themselves to board the Tinubu train.
Out of 36 state governors, Tinubu’s APC now controls approximately 32. At least 91 senators out of 105 are in the president’s camp. A major wave of defections in April 2026 pushed APC’s strength in the House of Representatives to roughly 280 out of 360 seats. This is not democracy. This is the theatre of subjugation. This is what happens when a political system is hollowed out by patronage, fear, and the intoxicating proximity to power.
Tinubu’s dominant one-party strategy is not new. As governor of Lagos, he transformed the state into a de facto one-party system by fusing patronage, loyalty, and coalition-building in such a way that no one can become governor without his blessing. His current national strategy simply scales up the same formula that kept Lagos politically unified under his control for over two decades. 
Let us talk about the money. Because it always comes back to the money.
A $13 billion highway — 700 kilometres of Atlantic coastal road from Lagos to Calabar — was awarded to Hitech Construction Company Ltd., a business owned by Gilbert Chagoury, who was listed by the Nigerian government itself as Tinubu’s “confidante” when the president took Chagoury to the COP28 climate conference in Dubai as part of Nigeria’s official delegation. No competitive bidding. No open tender. A convicted man receiving Nigeria’s most expensive infrastructure contract in history because he is the president’s friend.
Who is Gilbert Chagoury? In 2000, he was convicted in Switzerland of laundering money for Sani Abacha, one of the most notoriously corrupt dictators in African history, and has admitted to making illegal campaign contributions in the United States. This is Tinubu’s “confidante.” This is the man to whom Nigeria’s coastline has been delivered.
And it does not stop there. Tinubu’s son, Oluwaseyi, was a majority shareholder in an offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands alongside Ronald Chagoury Jr., son of the Chagoury family — the very family whose company received the $13 billion highway contract.  The BVI, of course, was chosen for its corporate anonymity. One family’s president. Another family’s billionaire. Their children, quietly, in the same offshore company. And Nigerians are told this is coincidence.
In 2025, ITB Construction Nigeria Limited, another Chagoury Group subsidiary, was selected by Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council to refurbish two major Lagos ports — Tin Can and Apapa — in a contract worth over one trillion naira, despite the company having no significant experience in seaport construction.  Then came Snake Island port terminal, awarded on a 45-year concession. The entire Lagos waterfront is being methodically transferred to one family. A Lebanese-Nigerian family. A family with a Swiss money laundering conviction on its record. A family tied to Tinubu by decades of business, social connection, and now the business arrangements of their children.
Meanwhile, Tinubu is in Paris.
He is always in Paris. Nigerians are dying in stampedes trying to collect bags of grain. Children are collapsing in classrooms from hunger. The naira has lost half its value since his inauguration. Electricity is a rumour. And the president — “Baba wey no well,” as they used to call him before they started collecting their envelopes — is at his favourite Parisian address, resting, while files accumulate in courthouses from Chicago to Washington.
The CIA, FBI, and DEA have filed statements opposing the release of unredacted files on Tinubu’s background, citing national security concerns — and referencing Tinubu’s possible status as a CIA asset.  Judge Beryl Howell has set a deadline for their disclosure. The files are coming. And the world is watching.
So who supports him? And why?
The first category is the simplest: those who are paid. From the woodworks, politicians are flooding and flocking to Tinubu without bridle — the very same people who, just a few years ago, called him a drug dealer, branded him unfit, and swore he would be dead within weeks.  These are not converts. These are contractors. They have received their federal appointments, their budget lines, their contracts, their waivers, their judicial favours. They are not supporting a man. They are collecting a fee.
The second category is the saddest: those who support him because he is Yoruba. Tribalism dressed in agbada. The argument goes: “It is our turn.” Our turn for what, exactly? Our turn to watch a man of no verifiable identity loot the country in our name? Our turn to be internationally associated with a president ranked by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project as the third most corrupt leader in the world in 2024 ? This is not Yoruba pride. This is Yoruba shame wrapped in denial.
The great Yoruba proverb warns: “Ogede nbaje, e l’o npon” — the banana is rotting even as it ripens. The elders who coined that phrase would not recognise what their grandchildren are doing today. They once denounced Salisu Buhari for certificate forgery. They once stood for truth in public life. Today, those who showed open disgust and disdain for forgery a while ago have suddenly wrapped a shawl of tarpaulin around themselves. 
The third category is the most dangerous: the intellectuals and media figures who know exactly what Tinubu is but calculate, daily, that their survival depends on silence. These are the ones who will be judged most harshly by history. Cowardice dressed as nuance. Collaboration disguised as pragmatism.
A former minister has warned that Nigeria is drifting toward a dangerous breaking point as moral values collapse, corruption festers, and the suffering of the masses deepens — warning that the country risks a grassroots explosion that could shake its very foundation.  The volcano he described is real. It is building. Hunger does not recognise party affiliation. Desperation does not respect the godfather.
One must ask Tinubu’s supporters — the genuine ones, if any remain — a simple series of questions. If a man cannot name his mother, does he love his country? If a man forged the schools he attended, can he be trusted with your children’s future? If a man forfeited money to the U.S. government over heroin trafficking, should he be handling Nigeria’s oil revenues? If a man gives a $13 billion contract to a Swiss-convicted money launderer who is his “confidante,” whose interests is he serving? Yours? Or his?
The supporters have no answers. They have only the cheque they were given to be in the crowd. They have only the tribal calculation that says my man, right or wrong. They have only the political death they fear if they speak.
Nigeria has paid too high a price for this silence.
The DEA files are coming. The FBI files are coming. Judge Howell has set her deadline. The world’s investigators have not forgotten. The international petitions are filed. The formal complaints sit in offices from Washington to London to Geneva to The Hague.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu — whoever he truly is — will one day have to account for what he has done to Nigeria. The tragedy is that his supporters, bought or tribal or simply afraid, will share that accounting. History keeps its own records. Unlike the ones in Chicago, they cannot be withheld.
Kio Amachree writes from Stockholm, Sweden and he is President, Worldview International.
