Follow Us on Google
People will die or come to grevious harm as in the above headline was from the attorneys to Nigeria’s president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to a United States of America [US] District of Columbia [DC] court judge, Beryl Howell. It played out for most of last week, though the case has lingered for years. The renewed battle in America was for access by the public to alleged damaging information on the not yet legally proven links between Tinubu and a heroine or cocaine trafficking ring in Chicago in the late 1980s and the early 1990s.
At each point, whenever the matter came up, Nigeria’s president had fought [at great personal cost or at greater public expense now that he is the president with an almost unfettered access to the public till], to fight off his opponents. He does the same for his personal and academic records from the Chicago State University [CSU] which he claimed that he attended, and graduated from in 1979. Can a man who has nothing to hide be so tenacious, determined, and wasteful in terms of time and money striving to keep the closet door firmly shut? If there is nothing to see as his acolytes and supporters are wont to say, then why the fuss? Therefore, there must be something that triggers the morbid fears of Tinubu and his supporters. It’s that thing ‘’to see’’ that has made the Tinubu saga a recurring decimal especially during election seasons.
However, for now, the only publicly available evidence of a probable association between the current Nigerian president and illicit drug business was the unequivocal statement by the relevant American agencies that $460,000 [Four hundred and sixty thousand dollars] only, was forfeited by Tinubu through a bank account that bore his name. And that the sum which formed a part of millions of dollars that were found domiciled in bank accounts that bore his name, was suspected to be the proceed of physchothropic business at the material time.
Accusers of the president in 2023, just before that year’s presidential election, saw a criminal conduct and a smoking gun that may actually have been statute-barred, but Tinubu’s defenders saw smoke without fire and the accompanying hulabaloo by the opposition as huffing and puffing that would come to naught. Indeed, a senior advocate of Nigeria [SAN] who is now the minister of aviation and aerospace [or is it aerodrome] development, Festus Keyamo, went overboard by arguing that the forfeiture suit was between the agencies of the US law enforcement and the offending bank account. He argued on national television that Bola Ahmed Tinubu was never a party to the forfeiture process. This same man had once sued this same Tinubu whom he accused of parading ‘oluwole’ or dodgy academic certificates. So, Keyamo may be a crusader for a sane society or a creepy oppotunist. He cannot be both. Can he?
Again, the issue of alleged illicit drug deals by the Nigerian ruler in his earlier incanation is back to the frontburner of political discourse at the eve of the 2027 election because it just could be that the matter was not conclusively dealt with in 2023 due to time constraints and the peculiar nature of the country’s jurisprudence which requires, as the case may be, the frontloading of documents and pleadings associated with any such suit. Now, again, Nigerians will have to suffer distractions from the foreboding prospects of their being unwilling witnesses to the presiding over of the death and funeral of a country. Sometimes it could be difficult to banish the thought that the farewell pamphlet [by his standard] of the seminal author of global reckoning, Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country, was about the defunct Republic of Biafra or the decaying Federal Republic of Nigeria. Achebe was not alien to peeking into the future as a writer.
‘’People will die’’, or people would come to egregious harm as propounded in this messy case of Tinubu’s files with the US Intel Community and law enforcement agencies, should be read and understood in their everyday meaning. It should also be read as an SOL [Standard Operating Language] of law enforcement. In this instance, it was used in connection with the US records regarding Tinubu from legal filings by the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigations]. The FBI position has been that fully releasing the president’s historical investigative files could ‘’endanger the life or physical safety’’ of an individual or individuals.
It’s not unusual under the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] lawsuits for the FBI to use this standard legal phrasing to argue that unredacted files could expose confidential informants, secret witnesses, or active investigative techniques. In a normal situation, ‘’people will die’’ phrase would not mean that anyone faces a ‘’current, physical death threat or that a violent plot is underway. As stated above, it is a formal legal justification used by the American authorities to argue for withholding sensitive or classified documents.
But the use of that SOL in this case of Tinubu, a file[s] and its [their] mystery contents, the stories of drug trafficking, the role of a cartel bagman, and everything inbetween has been unsettling and foreboding. Here, ‘’people will die’’, comes across as a counsel from concerned quarters that caution would be needed in dealing with the matter if the life and wellbeing of Nigerians meant anything to those aggressively pushing for the full disclosures of the contents of the file. The other meaning that could be read into ‘’people will die’’ would be that it was an ominious warning that Nigerians should be careful of what they are asking for. The wholesale release of the contents of the Tinubu Files could lead to a chain of catastrophic events that could spell doom for Nigeria and Nigerians. Scare-mongering. Apocalypse. Amaggedom.
The overarching question which should be on the lips of many Nigerians on this issue that ‘’people will die’’ should be who are the people who would die if Tinubu of the FBI Files is unmasked? Nigerians or Americans or the people inbetween? Is the Tinubu who is the current president of Nigeria markedly different from the Tinubu of the FBI Files? But for the detectives, investigators, informants, and whistle-blowers whose diligence led to the breaking up of that Chicago drug cartel, no other persons in the Files should be deserving of the protection of the awesome powers of the United States. Certainly, not after 30 years, and counting.
The main character in whose name the File is tagged, Tinubu, is already invincible, at least that’s the image he projects, since he was created as the president of Nigeria almost four years ago. If he is an asset [read spy] of the US as a ranking officer in the American Intel Community alleged not too long ago, then he would have nothing to fear, not for his life.
Surely, there are more considerations for the footdragging in spilling the beans about the suspected less than noble activities, image, and lifestyle of Tinubu while he lived in America, including preserving law enforcement methods and tactics, and evidence should the need arise in future. If the claim that people will die with the revealing of the potentially odious contents of the Tinubu FBI Files extended to Nigeria, then that fear becomes ridiculous and laughable. People are already dying in Nigeria, and in their numbers. To think that the deaths in the country which has attained epidemic level is happening when the country is not formally at war.
The ongoing deaths in our country are not limited to ravaging insurgency and kidnapping, especially in parts of the northern region, nor the sundry criminalities in the southern areas. Much of the deaths in Nigeria are directly and unmistakably traceable to the economic, political and social policies of President Tinubu. It has to be acknowledged that the president in 2023 inherited a country that was designated as the poverty capital of the world, in 2019. He then proceeded rapidly to make it worse. Tinubu has been in office for over three years and no statistics has so far captured that any Nigerian has been lifted out of poverty. Instead, report after report, from local and international agencies, points in the direction of deepening poverty. More than 60% of Nigerians surveyed by the National Bureau of Statistics [NBS] have been determined to be dimensionally poor. If the dirt poor citizens are added to the dimensionally poor, then more than 80% of Nigerians could safely be classified as poor. And broken.
At the core of pauperising Nigerians and killing them in degrees are the twin neo-liberal economic policies of subsidy removal from products and services that governments provide, and the devaluation of the national currency, the Naira. They were unthinkingly implemented simultaneously in 2023. The same policy options were adopted and implemented in the so-called Structural Adjustment Programme [SAP] about 30 years ago under the military presidency of Gen. Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. They failed and were abandoned. Nothing recommended them. Nobody commended them. They were one-size-fits-all economic recovery prescriptions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund [IMF], the notorious twin Bretton Woods institutions. Yet, 30 years after, Tinubu’s regime found them attractive and then, like adult delinquents and drunken sailors, introduced SAP 2.0 even before the full complements of a functional government was in place.
Tinubu and his co-travellers can spin Gross Domestic Product’s [GDP’s] anemic growth as it pleases them; the illusion of money in the quantum leap in statutory financial allocations to the subnationals; snapping up of government treasury bills and bonds and sundry securities by investors because of their outrageous returns or coupon rates [which by the way balloon our debts]; accretion to the external reserves which is primarily assurance to exporting economies that Nigeria can pay the bills for its massive and almost unending imports.
Nigerians who are waiting for the United States to unmask Tinubu and strip him bare may wait for eternity. Every country is driven by its national interest and America should not be expected to work against itself if truly the president of a country of well over 240 million Africans is its asset. Any asset of the US will be maximised by that country in the unfolding global geopolitics and world order. So the duty before Nigerians is to determine for themselves the country they desire and deserve. We cannot outsource it. The Presidency is not just an office and its occupant should not be been seen merely as an office holder. It should be a mirror. Is that office a true resemblance of who we are as Nigerians? We may be bad as a people but are we as ugly as we see ourselves in our presidency? An opportunity presents itself in the next few months to cleanse the Augean Stable. We can. And we should.
