Although the crime and forfeiture of $460,000 proceeds of hard drugs were committed in the United States, it was lately discovered in Nigeria. Precisely, it was in 2023 by opponents of Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s presidential candidature.
Opponents made discreet efforts in the Courts to stop his swearing in as president but futile. The judges appeared compromised and chose to throw Nigeria into disaster for allowing a drug baron to be sworn as president against the reputation of the country.
As the case was exposed and efforts made to apprehend Tinubu, people will die or come to grievous harm was the defence offered by Attorneys to Bola Tinubu to a United States of America’s District of Colombia (DC) Court Judge, Beryl Howell.
It played out for about few days, though the case has lingered for years. The renewed battle in the US is for access by the public to alleged damaging information on the not yet legally proven links between Tinubu and a heroin or cocaine trafficking ring in Chicago in the late 1980s and early 90s.
At each point, whenever the matter comes up, Tinubu fights at great personal cost or at greater public expense now that he is the president with an almost unfettered access to public till, to fight off his opponents. He does the same for his personal and academic records from the Chicago State University which he claimed to have attended, and graduated in 1979 but without any record of attending primary and secondary schools anywhere.
But can a man who has nothing to hide be so tenacious, determined, and wasteful in terms of time and resources striving to keep the closet door firmly locked? 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 like mind apologists. It’s that thing “to see” that has made the Tinubu saga a recurring decimal especially at election season.
However, for now, the only publicly available evidence of a probable association between the Tinubu and illicit drug business is the unequivocal statement by the relevant American agencies that $460,000 was forfeited by Tinubu through a bank account that bore his name. And that the sum which formed a part of millions of dollars discovered domiciled in bank accounts that bore his name, was suspected to be proceed of physchothropic business at the material time.
Accusers of Tinubu 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), now Nigerian Aviation Minister, Festus Keyamo, went overboard by arguing that the forfeiture suit was between agencies of the US law enforcement and the offending bank account. He argued on national television that Tinubu was never a party to the forfeiture process. This same Keyamo had once sued Tinubu whom he accused of parading ‘oluwole’ or dodgy academic certificates. So Keyamo may now be a crusader for a sane society or a creepy opportunist in defence of his paymaster. He cannot be both. Can he? At best, he is now a creepy opportunist as a Senior Advocate of Nigeria not ashamed to bury truth for sycophancy. This is an insult to the silk and the legal profession.
Again, the issue of alleged illicit drug deals by Tinubu that I hate for now to call my president, in his earlier incarnation is back to the front burner of political discourse as the election season approaches 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 unwilling witnesses to the presiding over of the death and funeral of a country so blessed without sincere leadership. Sometimes it could be difficult to banish the thought that the farewell pamphlet 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 prolific writer, that we drunk from his fountain of knowledge as students in Government College Keffi (GCK).
“People will die,” or people would come to egregious harm as propounded in this messy case 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 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) law suits for the FBI to use this standard legal phrasing to argue that treated files could expose confidential informants, secret witnesses, or active investigative techniques. In 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, it is a formal legal justification used by US authorities to argue for withholding sensitive or classified documents.
But the use of that SOL, in this case of Tinubu file (s) and its, (their) mystery contents, the stories of drug trafficking, the role of a cartel bagman and everything in between 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 ominous warning that Nigerians should be careful of what they are asking for. The wholesale release of the contents of the files could lead to a chain of catastrophic events that can spell doom for Nigeria and Nigerians.
The overreaching question which should be on the lips of Nigerians on this very embarrassing issue that “people will die” should be who are those people that will die if Tinubu of the FBI Files is unmasked? Are they Nigerians or Americans or the people in between? Is Bola Ahmed Tinubu who is currently the ‘imposed’ president on Nigeria marked differently from the Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the FBI Files? But for the detectives, investigators, informants, and whistleblowers whose diligence led to the breaking up of that Chicago drug cartel, no other persons in the Files should be deserving of protection of the awesome powers of the United States. Certainly not after 30 years and counting!
FBI should gather courage to save the reputation of Nigeria by releasing Tinubu’s Files for public scrutiny. Nigeria cannot afford to be governed again by renowned a drug merchant with shady character, and non-existing integrity.
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues
