These are my tears. They clear my airways. I cry with both eyes and my mouth open, loud enough to deprive you of comfort.
Look at the pattern before you look at the man.
Tinubu’s style of government is not national. It is personal, regional and caucus-based. The biggest contracts do not travel through open competition so much as through a small, recurring circle of names. You have heard me say this before. Here it is again, with dates attached, because dates are harder to argue with than instinct.
Exhibit: the Ogun Deep Seaport
On September 24, in Paris, the Ogun State Government signed Memoranda of Understanding with DP World MEA FZE for the Gateway Deep Sea Port and the Ogun State Blue Marine Special Economic Zone — more than $7 billion in projected investment, over 50,000 promised jobs. President Tinubu witnessed it, alongside Minister of Marine and Blue Economy Adegboyega Oyetola and NPA Director-General Abubakar Dantsoho.
Notice where it was signed. Not Abuja. Not Abeokuta. Paris — the city where the President had, by then, been extending his “working vacation” for the better part of a month.
So: who opened that door?
Gilbert Chagoury. Owner of the Chagoury Group. The President’s friend of three decades.
The meeting nobody in Ogun called
On February 26, 2025 — nineteen months before Ogun signed anything — Chagoury arranged a sit-down in Abuja between President Tinubu, DP World’s then-chairman and CEO Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, and Minister Oyetola, to discuss the Dubai company’s entry into Nigerian ports. Multiple outlets, including Businessday, THISDAY and Arise TV, reported it the same way: Chagoury in the room, arranging access, months before Dapo Abiodun’s government had anything on paper with DP World at all.
One detail the wire reports slid past without pausing on: Minister Oyetola, the man at that table representing Nigeria’s maritime interests, is the President’s cousin.
Daddy had already opened the door. A year and a half later, son — Ogun’s governor — walked through it, with a $7 billion MoU in hand. How convenient that Ogun did not need a global investor search so much as a seat at the President’s table, already warmed by his oldest friend.
And then the government turns around and tells other states that all they need to do is have what it takes to attract investors themselves. Just typical. Bless Dapo Abiodun for how hard he worked the region to get daddy’s friend to help him.
The man in that room resigned in disgrace
Here is what neither Ogun’s press release nor Chagoury’s admirers will volunteer, and it belongs in this column because it happened to the very man Chagoury walked into that Abuja meeting.
On February 13, 2026 — less than a year after sitting across from President Tinubu — Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem resigned as chairman and chief executive of DP World. The U.S. Department of Justice had released files documenting a correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein running for years, including exchanges after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor — communications, Reuters reported, that touched on sexual relationships Epstein had helped arrange for him. Britain’s own development finance institution, British International Investment, and Canada’s La Caisse pension fund both suspended new investment in DP World over it before he stepped down.
In fairness — and this column tries to stay fair even while it is crying — both institutions resumed their partnerships once bin Sulayem was replaced, and DP World’s new chairman, Essa Kazim, and new chief executive, Yuvraj Narayan, are the leadership Ogun State actually signed with in September, not bin Sulayem himself. I will not pretend the man who signed the final MoU is the man in the Epstein files. He is not.
But he is not who opened the door either. That was bin Sulayem, sat down by Chagoury, seven months before his own resignation. The introduction that made the Ogun deal possible was arranged with a man whose company needed a governance reset within the year to survive the relationship his own emails documented. Nigeria’s newest $7 billion port partnership traces its origin to that room, that year, that man — and no amount of new letterhead changes whose phone call put Tinubu across the table from him in the first place.
The rest of the file, briefly, because you have read it here before
This is not Chagoury’s first appearance in this newspaper and it will not be his last, so I will not re-litigate the whole record here. The short version: a Lagos coastal land grant in 2007 that became Eko Atlantic, made while Tinubu was governor. The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, awarded to his Hitech Construction without open tender. The Lagos ports renovation, awarded to his ITB despite what Africa Intelligence’s own reporting called a lack of experience in the sector, with Tinubu “having the final say.” The President’s son, Seyi, sitting on the board of CDK Integrated Industries, a Chagoury subsidiary. A Swiss conviction in 2000 for laundering Abacha-era funds, a $66 million return, a denial of knowledge maintained ever since. And in January this year, the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger, Nigeria’s second-highest honour, placed on Chagoury’s chest by the President himself.
Now add the port. Now add the cousin at the table. Now add the man who had to resign.
A question the Procurement Act already answers
Nigeria’s Public Procurement Act sets open competitive bidding as the general rule for covered federal procurement, with specific, narrow exceptions written into the law itself. I raise this carefully, because the Ogun deal is technically a state matter — Ogun has its own procurement law, and a Memorandum of Understanding is not yet a binding contract, which is precisely the kind of distinction a government spokesman will reach for the moment this column is read aloud in Abuja. Fine. Let them reach for it. Then let them answer the plainer question underneath it: was there a competitive process at any level — state or federal — before Ogun sat down with the one global port operator introduced to the presidency by the President’s own friend? Or did nineteen months of private access substitute for the search entirely?
Are federal projects not meant for open bidding? Is a state project, dependent on a federal presidency’s phonebook, meant for anything less?
Nigeria is starting to look like a private network wearing a government’s clothes
Apparently Tinubu does not just control the government. He controls the Rolodex that brings investors to the government too — and the two have become nearly impossible to tell apart. That is not diplomacy. That is not investment promotion. That is a patronage system with a national flag draped over it.
Just like a crying baby, you have two choices
I will not soften the close, because I did not soften the opening.
Either you attend to my needs — publish the full record of who introduced whom, to whom, and when; show the competitive process, state or federal, that Ogun ran before it sat down with Chagoury’s chosen partner; explain what a minister who shares the President’s blood is doing brokering a deal his cousin’s friend arranged — or you get ready to enjoy the discomfort of a country that keeps asking and keeps not being answered.
Because the neighbours are watching. And they are not, any longer, particularly proud of your parenting.
It is a truth at a time.
This is a United Continental Post column. It draws on reporting by Businessday, THISDAY (citing Africa Intelligence), Arise TV, Sahara Reporters, Peoples Gazette, West Africa Weekly and Nigerian Bulletin on the February 2025 meeting and September 2026 Ogun–DP World MoUs; CNN, Al Jazeera, Reuters and Modern Diplomacy on Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem’s February 2026 resignation from DP World; and prior UCP reporting on Gilbert Chagoury’s history and contracts. DP World’s current chairman and CEO, Essa Kazim and Yuvraj Narayan, were not part of the 2025 meeting described here and are not implicated in the matters concerning their predecessor.
