By Kio Amachree
Every week the Tinubu machine floods our timelines with another video of Seyi Tinubu. Seyi arriving. Seyi waving. Seyi in convoy with outriders, sirens and armed escorts, sweeping through a city where citizens cannot get a police response for a burglary. They post it as though nothing has changed. As though a federal judge in Washington is not sitting on their father’s files. As though the world is not watching.
Let us be clear about one thing. Seyi Tinubu holds no office. He was elected to nothing. He was appointed to nothing. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria knows no such position as the President’s son. Yet he moves with the trappings of state power, paid for by the Nigerian taxpayer, and people who cross him have a habit of ending up in DSS custody.
That is not my invention. The former NANS president Atiku Isah told a Federal High Court in Abuja that he was beaten, stabbed and held by the DSS for over two weeks after refusing what he described as an offer from Seyi Tinubu to step aside, and he has sued Seyi Tinubu, the DSS and the NTA for thirty-eight billion naira. Only weeks ago a Lagos entertainer was picked up over a video about the President’s son. His own lawyer went online begging the presidency for forgiveness. Forgiveness. For a video. This is how a republic learns to kneel.
Meanwhile Seyi sits on the board of CDK Integrated Industries, a Chagoury Group company, while his father’s government hands Hitech Construction, another Chagoury Group company, the Lagos–Calabar coastal highway at an estimated thirteen billion dollars without competitive bidding. The presidency’s defence is that he joined the board in 2018 and that a tiles factory has nothing to do with a highway. Any first-year student of corporate governance knows that conflict of interest is about the relationship, not the product line. In any serious country he would have resigned the day his father was sworn in. He did not, because in his mind the country is the family business.
And this is the moment he chooses to parade himself. His father is in a Washington courtroom fighting to keep sealed the records of a 1993 heroin-money forfeiture, and a sworn FBI declaration has now confirmed there was an investigation. My own conviction, which I have stated many times and state again as opinion, is that the reason those files are so dangerous is that they show what he gave the Americans to save himself, and whose names he gave. That is what he is fighting to bury. And his son is on Instagram in a motorcade.
I said this to Seyi directly once and I will say it in public now. Every siren, every outrider, every viral video is another knot in the noose around his own neck. The more he behaves like the crown prince of Nigeria, the more he makes himself the single most visible target for the sins of his father, his stepmother and himself. When the reckoning comes, and it always comes, the crowd does not look for the accountant. It looks for the face it was made to look at every day.
He should read his history. Isabel dos Santos was once the richest woman in Africa, untouchable, the daughter of a president who ruled Angola for thirty-eight years. Today her assets are frozen across three continents, she is charged at home and she cannot go back. Mohammed Abacha, son of a dictator who thought he owned Nigeria, spent years in detention after his father died, stood trial for murder, and watched the world spend two decades clawing back the family’s loot from Switzerland, Jersey and the United States. Both of them believed the sirens would never stop. Both of them were wrong.
Power is a drug. Seyi Tinubu is plainly addicted to it, and like every addict he cannot see the day the supply runs out. That day is not far. The files will be released. The contracts will be examined. The people who were beaten in DSS cells will be called to testify. And a man who holds no office will find that he has no immunity.
Nigeria belongs to Nigerians. It does not belong to a family.
Kio Amachree, the founder of
Worldview International, wrote this article from Stockholm.
The 1993 Chicago matter was a civil forfeiture settlement, not a criminal conviction. Allegations concerning informant status, the coastal highway procurement and the treatment of detainees remain unproven in court and are stated here as matters of public record, pending litigation and the author’s opinion.