Letters from Stockholm
By Kio Amachree
Monsieur le Président,
I write for myself, and I believe for millions of Nigerians at home and across the diaspora who watched the photographs released this morning: you, Madame Macron, and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at a private dinner in the Élysée Palace, in the middle of his three-week European holiday. No communiqué. No agenda. No account to the Nigerian people of what was discussed.
So I ask you plainly. What is Bola Tinubu giving France?
Let me explain why the alarm bells ring. Your former colonies have walked away from you. Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Senegal: one after another they have shown French soldiers the door, fed up with what they call neo-colonialism, exploitation and racism. France is searching for a new footing in Africa, and I understand why. I have long said that without Africa the lights would go out in Paris within days. French influence over the money and banking of its former colonies through the CFA franc is no secret to any African.
But Nigeria was never your colony. We owe Paris nothing. Yet look at the record. Since taking office on 29 May 2023, this president has spent approximately 261 days outside Nigeria on 51 foreign trips, according to a Daily Trust analysis of official travel records and flight data. That count was taken before he boarded the plane for this latest holiday, his 52nd trip.
Two hundred and sixty-one days, Mr President, while his people bury their dead and cannot afford to eat. And his most frequent destination of all is France: more than fifty days in Paris across a dozen visits, state, working, private and holiday, as though Abuja were an outpost of the old French empire. It is outrageous, and Nigerians have paid more than 37 billion naira for the privilege.
Consider who you are dining with. In 1993, a United States federal court in Chicago ordered 460,000 dollars in his accounts forfeited as proceeds tied to heroin trafficking. It was a civil forfeiture; he was never charged or convicted, and I state that for the record. But today, as a sitting president, he is in an American court fighting to keep the FBI and DEA files on that matter hidden from the Nigerians he governs. An innocent man opens the file. He is fighting tooth and nail to keep it shut.
This is a man whose name, age, primary and secondary schooling remain unanswered questions. His Chicago State University certificate was shown under oath in an American deposition to be riddled with discrepancies, including the question of a record marked female. His claimed career at Deloitte has been publicly disputed. Nigerians have asked these questions for years. We have received no answers.
Then there is his business partner, Gilbert Chagoury, who makes his home in your capital. He was convicted of money laundering in Geneva in 2000 over the Abacha loot, and reached a 1.8 million dollar resolution with the US Department of Justice in 2019. Under Tinubu, companies linked to him have received contracts reported at some 13 billion dollars, and in January he was handed the GCON, our second highest national honour. What is your relationship with this man, Mr President? What is France’s?
It is my firm conviction, though not yet public record, that Tinubu has been an asset of American agencies since 1993, and that his handlers are now struggling to protect him. I do not see Washington rolling out the carpet for him. Yet Paris does. Why?
Do not mistake me for an enemy of France. I know your country well. I have done big business with France. When Peugeot Automobile Nigeria was putting the nation on wheels, my father’s company, with Chausson of France as our partner, made every radiator fitted to every Peugeot manufactured in Nigeria. That was honest partnership: French engineering, Nigerian industry, Nigerian jobs, everything in the open. I have homes in France. I love the country. It is precisely because I know what a decent relationship between our two nations looks like that I recognise one that is not.
I come from the old school. My father, Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC, helped build the legal system of Nigeria, served as Attorney-General in the British Cameroons and as Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General, and became Africa’s first United Nations Under-Secretary-General, responsible for the trusteeship territories and the UN’s civilian operation in the Congo crisis.
I watched power at close range as a child. I was educated at Eton, the school of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, and at the Wharton School, like President Trump. I tell you this not to boast but so you understand that I know what I am talking about. I know power, Mr President. And I smell a rat. A big, fat rat.
Nigeria is not a backwater banana republic. Most of us went to real schools and have the genuine certificates to prove it. Our people are suffering as they have not suffered since independence, and I must warn you that this president, and the family that wields influence around him without any elected office, are resented to a degree I have not seen since General Sani Abacha.
So hear this warning, offered in good faith. Whatever you and Tinubu have agreed in private, whatever belonging to Nigerians has been promised or signed away to France, minerals, concessions, contracts, will be reviewed when he leaves power, and everything given without the consent of the Nigerian people will be revoked. One day all of it will be known.
Think of the future, Mr President. Think of France’s already damaged name in Africa. Do not destroy your relationship with 230 million Nigerians for the sake of one desperate man.
I wish you well.
Amachree, Founder and President, Worldview International Stockholm
