On Thursday in Paris, President Bola Tinubu stood beside Ogun State Governor Dapo Abiodun and watched DP World of Dubai sign memoranda of understanding for the Gateway Deep Seaport at Ogun Waterside and a 10,000-hectare Blue Marine Special Economic Zone. The Presidency says the package envisages more than $7 billion in initial investment and 50,000 direct jobs. The President promised regulatory clarity, policy stability, federal roads, rail and power, and the protection of the maritime domain. He called it Renewed Hope in action.
I do not quarrel with a deep seaport. Apapa and Tin Can are choked, the draft is too shallow, and Nigeria pays a fortune in demurrage for the privilege of being badly run. A four-kilometre berth with an eighteen-metre draft is exactly what the country needs. My quarrel is with how Nigeria got here, who opened the door, and why the same man is standing behind it yet again.
Let us go back to the twenty-sixth of February 2025. On that day, according to Africa Intelligence, ThisDay, BusinessDay and SaharaReporters, President Tinubu sat down with Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, then chairman and chief executive of DP World, together with the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy Adegboyega Oyetola. In the room with them was Gilbert Chagoury. Africa Intelligence reported plainly that Chagoury was working to bring DP World into Nigeria’s ports. Nineteen months later, the Emiratis are signing in Paris, the city where Chagoury keeps his home, and the President is there to bless it.
So let us be accurate about what Thursday was. It was not a federal contract signed in Abuja after open bidding. It was a state MoU, witnessed by the President, underwritten by federal promises, and traceable in a straight line back to a meeting that Nigeria’s most persistent middleman helped to arrange. Chagoury does not own DP World. He does something better. He owns the introduction. In Nigeria, the introduction is where the money is.
Who is this man the President keeps at his side? The record, not my opinion, says the following. In 2000, a court in Geneva convicted Gilbert Chagoury in connection with the laundering of money looted by Sani Abacha, and he paid to have the matter settled. In 2019, the United States Department of Justice resolved a case against him over illegal campaign contributions with a payment of 1.8 million dollars. For a period, he could not get into the United States at all. He has denied wrongdoing throughout, and I note those denials. But no denial erases a conviction, and no honour from Aso Rock does either. In January this year Tinubu gave him the GCON, one of the highest honours in the land. The National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, once called this man corrupt on the record and tried to have him stopped at an airport. Ribadu now salutes him in the Villa. That is the state of Nigeria’s memory.
Now count what has passed through that door since 2023. The Lagos to Calabar coastal highway to Hitech, at a price that changes every time a minister opens his mouth. The seven hundred million dollar Apapa and Tin Can renovation to ITB, a company with no port record, chosen at a Federal Executive Council meeting in February 2025 where, we were told, the President had the final say. A forty-five-year handover of the Snake Island terminal. The seven hundred and forty-six million-pound British export guarantee for the same ports. The Eko Atlantic concession that runs for seventy-eight years. I wrote in August that the verifiable Chagoury-linked figure stood at roughly thirteen billion dollars. Add Thursday’s seven billion, brokered rather than awarded, and the ledger of one man’s access to one President is now knocking on twenty billion dollars. I still refuse the hundred billion figure that circulates online. I do not need it. Twenty is an obscenity on its own.
And look at the partner Chagoury chose. Sultan bin Sulayem resigned from DP World on the thirteenth of February this year after the Epstein files showed his correspondence with a convicted sex offender. Companies around the world put distance between themselves and Dubai’s port giant. Nigeria did the opposite. Nigeria sat tighter. The man who took the February 2025 meeting is gone in disgrace, and the deal he took it for survives him. Ask yourself what that tells the world about who really decides in Nigeria.
I want to say something about Ogun Waterside specifically. Ijebu land is where the Mexican meth labs were found in the forests this year. It is the corridor of the coastal highway. It is now to be the site of a port, a free zone, a navy base, and OK LNG. Everything is converging on one stretch of coast, and every road into it seems to run past the same Lebanese address. When one foreigner sits at the junction of a nation’s ports, roads, terminals and free zones, that is not investment. That is a toll gate.
Governor Abiodun will say Ogun found the land and structured the deal. Fine. Then publish the MoU. Publish the term sheet. Tell Nigerians what DP World has been promised in tax holidays, land tenure, exclusivity, and dispute resolution. Tell us who Sky Capital, the financial adviser thanked by the President, actually is and who owns it. Tell us whether any Chagoury company, or any company on whose board the President’s son sits, has been promised a slice of the construction, the dredging, the concessions inside the zone. If the answer is no, saying so costs nothing. Silence will be read as the answer.
One. Publish the Ogun DP World memoranda of understanding and every side agreement in full, within thirty days.
Two. Declare the role of Gilbert Chagoury, the Chagoury Group and any of its affiliates in the DP World arrangement, in writing, signed by the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy.
Three. Bar any person with a foreign criminal conviction for money laundering from brokering, advising on or benefiting from Nigerian public infrastructure, and revoke honours granted to such persons.
Four. Commission an independent forensic audit of every Chagoury-linked award since May 2023, with the report published, not filed.
Five. Prepare the evidence register now. The Isabel Precedent is not a threat; it is a timetable. Angola recovered its money after its ruling family lost power. Nigeria will do the same, and every contract signed in Paris, London and Dubai will be reopened by people who were not in the room.
A President who is asked, month after month, why the same convicted middleman sits at every big table, and who answers by giving him a national honour and taking him to dinner at the Élysée, has told Nigerians all they need to know. He does not care what we think. He cares who gets the introduction.
The broker never loses. The people always pay. That is the arrangement. It ends when Nigerians end it, by ballot, by law, and by ledger.
Nigeria belongs to Nigerians.
