Nobody has proved that Bola Tinubu came to power to loot Nigeria. He has spent three years making sure nobody can check.
On Wednesday night, on Channels Television, the President’s own Special Adviser on Policy Communication, Daniel Bwala, said what the Presidency has avoided saying for three years. “More people went down to poverty,” he said. “I acknowledge it.”
Hold on to that sentence. It is the only honest thing the government has said about its record this year, and it was dragged out of a spokesman in a television studio. Everything else in this editorial is what that admission looks like when you set it beside the paperwork.
We are not going to tell you what is in Bola Tinubu’s heart. Intent is the one thing nobody outside him can prove, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling you something. But you do not need to prove intent to ask the question a free people is entitled to ask of its ruler: what are you hiding, and why does it take lawyers in two countries to hide it?
The friend, the son, and the contracts
Start with the man the President calls reliable. Gilbert Chagoury was convicted by a Geneva court in 2000 of money laundering and aiding a criminal organisation over accounts tied to the Abacha family’s looting of Nigeria. He paid a fine and undertook to return $66 million. Four years later, by the account of the EFCC’s own chairman at the time, he slipped an arrest sting on a tip-off. In 2021 he admitted to the US Justice Department that he had routed illegal foreign donations into American campaigns, and paid $1.8 million to avoid prosecution.
That is the man whose companies have been winning Nigeria’s largest infrastructure awards since 2023. The Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway, a project of roughly $3.6 billion in public money, went to his Hitech Construction through what the Works Minister himself calls restrictive bidding, not an open tender, after the same minister had first said the company would finance it. His ITB Nigeria was picked for a ports rehabilitation worth about $700 million. In July, Hitech was handed ₦1.7 trillion for the Sokoto–Badagry highway. ITB sits in the consortium for a 45-year terminal concession at Snake Island.
The President’s son, Seyi Tinubu, sits on the board of CDK Integrated Industries, a Hitech subsidiary. The Presidency confirmed it and called it irrelevant. The OCCRP found he had also been a majority shareholder, alongside Ronald Chagoury Jr., in a British Virgin Islands company.
Then, in January, Tinubu gave Chagoury the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger, Nigeria’s second-highest honour, previously reserved for the Vice President, the Senate President, the Chief Justice, and heads of state and international institutions. There was no ceremony and no announcement. Nigerians found out when billionaire Femi Otedola posted the certificate online, eleven days later.
And look at how even the newest deal was opened. The $7 billion Ogun deep-sea port memorandum, signed in Paris on September 24, traces back, according to reporting by Businessday and THISDAY, to a February 2025 meeting that Chagoury arranged between the President, DP World’s then-chief Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, and Marine Minister Adegboyega Oyetola, who is reported to be the President’s cousin. Bin Sulayem resigned a year later over his documented correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein. One friend. One family. One door, held open from the inside.
The file he will not let you read
In 1993, a US federal court ordered $460,000 forfeited from an account linked to Tinubu as proceeds of narcotics trafficking or funds involved in money laundering, in a case that grew out of a Chicago heroin investigation. That was a civil forfeiture. He was never criminally charged, and he denies wrongdoing. That is what the record establishes, and it is where this editorial stops.
What it cannot explain is what has happened since. A US judge ruled in April 2025 that the FBI and DEA could not simply refuse to say whether records on Tinubu existed. On August 28 this year, Tinubu himself, through his own lawyers, filed to keep the redactions in place, arguing that the records concern his life as a private individual and a student. On September 28, the plaintiff, Aaron Greenspan, asked the court to compel Tinubu to say under oath whether he or anyone acting for him was behind cyberattacks on his website. That is a pending request, not a finding. It is also a sentence no head of state should have to read about himself.
Ask yourself what an innocent man does with a file that would clear him. He does not litigate to keep it closed.
The paper that will not add up
The questions here are not rumours. They are documents, and none has been answered.
The diploma. Chicago State University’s registrar testified in October 2023 that Tinubu attended and graduated in 1979. He also testified that the diploma Tinubu submitted to INEC in June 2022 did not come from the university and could not be authenticated. The Supreme Court never ruled on whether that certificate was genuine. It ruled that the challenge came too late.
The dates. University records carry Tinubu’s birth date as March 29, 1954 on one document and 1955 on another. He has sworn to March 29, 1952.
The schools. His 1999 INEC form claimed Government College Ibadan, which has no record of him, and the University of Chicago, which is not where he studied. The man who filled in the form said he assumed. Another account came later from the President’s own former press secretary. When INEC published his 2027 nomination papers in August, the entry for every school before university was blank.
Deloitte. Tinubu has said he earned around $1.8 million at Deloitte and Touche, the foundation of his wealth. In September 2022, Deloitte’s legal department told a subpoenaing investigator it had no record of him in its systems. That is not proof he never worked there; decades-old records may not exist. It is, however, a claim he has never backed with a pay slip, an offer letter or a tax record.
The passport. In 2023, a document purporting to be a Guinean diplomatic passport surfaced. Guinea’s embassy in Abuja said such passports are issued only by that country’s presidency, and did not authenticate this one. His lawyers told the tribunal it had expired in 2020. The court threw the exhibit out as improperly certified and criticised the petitioners for raising it late. Nobody serious claims Tinubu is not Nigerian. The question is the oath: on his INEC form, he swore he had never voluntarily acquired foreign citizenship. No court has ever decided whether that was true.
Every one of these has an innocent explanation available. Every one of them has gone unexplained for years. A man who wanted these questions closed would have closed them.
The bill
Meanwhile, here is what Nigerians have been handed.
Public debt went from ₦87.38 trillion when he took office to ₦159.35 trillion by March, an increase of more than 80 percent. The World Bank puts poverty at 63 percent, roughly 140 million people, up from 56 percent in 2023. SBM Intelligence counted 5,091 people killed in violence in the second quarter of this year alone. After declaring fuel subsidy dead in 2023, NNPC’s own audited 2024 accounts showed ₦17.5 trillion owed to it by the federation in under-recoveries and energy security costs.
In December 2024, 67 Nigerians, most of them children and women, died in stampedes at food handouts. Asked about it, the President called it a grave error by organisers, then told the country it should get on with it. GovSpend records put him at 52 foreign trips and about 261 days abroad by April, at a cost of ₦37.64 billion, with more than 50 of those days in France. This September, while he was in Paris for nearly a month, 37 people died in NSCDC custody in Minna, and he ordered a panel from Europe. On Friday, with the nation preparing to mark its 66th year, a Speaker read out his message asking Nigerians to give his government more opportunity. He was in Paris.
His defenders point to a steadier naira and slower inflation. Neither has fed a single one of those 140 million people.
What to ask before you give him four more years
You do not need to believe a word of this newspaper. Ask for the documents.
Publish the competing bids, the technical evaluations and the beneficial-ownership declarations for every Chagoury-linked award. Declare, under oath, whether the President or his son holds any direct or indirect interest in those companies. Withdraw the objection in the Washington court and let the redactions fall. Produce the Chicago State application file, the primary and secondary school records, and the Deloitte pay record, or say plainly that none exist. Answer the oath question on the INEC form.
If the answers are clean, they cost him nothing. If he will not give them, then ask every politician who wants your vote in 2027, and every neighbour who tells you to trust him, why not.
Nigerians do not have to prove he came to loot. A man with nothing to hide does not spend three years hiding it.
This is a United Continental Post editorial. It draws on Channels Television, Vanguard, Legit.ng and Naija News reporting of Daniel Bwala’s remarks; Swiss court records as reported by the Council on Foreign Relations and Sahara Reporters; US Department of Justice records; reporting by OCCRP, Premium Times, Businessday, THISDAY, TheCable, Daily Trust and Peoples Gazette; US court filings in Greenspan v. Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys and the 1993 Northern District of Illinois forfeiture case; the deposition of Chicago State University’s registrar; the Supreme Court’s October 2023 judgment; INEC records; Deloitte’s September 2022 letter as reported by Sahara Reporters; the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal rulings on the Guinean passport; and World Bank, DMO, SBM Intelligence, NNPC and GovSpend figures. President Tinubu has never been criminally charged in the United States and denies wrongdoing. The questions about his certificate, birth records, Deloitte employment and Guinean passport have not been adjudicated on their merits by any court.
