Kio Amachree

WE SAY NO to Kings written by Kio Amachree SKJ Records 2025 (Verse 1) We say no to Kings, we say no to would-be Caesars We say no to Kings, we say no to third-rate convicted grifters How can a man with a permanent suntan think he should be sitting on a throne? Stick a fish bone down his throat, do him a favor, put him out of his misery (Chorus) We say no to Kings, we say no to would-be Caesars We say no to Kings, we say no to third-rate convicted grifters Democracy is sacred, as is the constitution Democracy is our birthright — we say no to Kings (Verse 2) A third-class fat slob, incompetent, wants to wear the crown of America He was too scared to fight for his country, but when it comes to corruption and money He enriches himself and his crime family — we see him for what he is (Chorus) We say no to Kings, we say no to would-be Caesars We say no to Kings, we say no to third-rate convicted grifters Democracy is sacred, as is the constitution Democracy is our birthright — we say no to Kings (Bridge) No six-time bankrupt, Hitler-loving slob will sit upon that throne He’s out of his mind and so are his enablers We say hell no to Kings, we say hell no to would-be Caesars We say freedom for our children’s children — the rule of law forever (Chorus — full) We say no to Kings, we say no to would-be Caesars We say no to Kings, we say no to third-rate convicted grifters Democracy is sacred, as is the constitution Democracy is our birthright — we say no to Kings (Outro) We say hell no to Kings — freedom and law forever. #Hashtags #Democracy #RuleOfLaw #NoToKings #Freedom #SayNo

A Prayer for Nigeria, From a Concerned Citizen Oct 29, 2026 · @Kio Amachree This prayer did not cost a private jet We do not have to fly to Mecca to pray for Nigeria. We cannot afford to fly to Mecca to pray for Nigeria. And we do not need to. A prayer for a country can be said in the comfort of our own homes, on a mat on a concrete floor, by a kerosene lamp when the light has gone again, with nothing in the pot and nothing in the account. God is not hard of hearing. He does not require a presidential jet, an entourage, a hotel floor and a security detail before He will listen to a Nigerian. Yet in yet another splurge of taxpayer money, this man, from God knows where, has flown out again to play mind games with the suffering masses. The photographs will come. The aides will tell us he prayed for the nation. The nation he prayed for will still be queueing for fuel, counting the price of garri, burying the dead from the roads and the forests, and wondering how a prayer that costs more than a village's annual budget could be offered in our name. So here is a prayer for Nigeria from a concerned citizen. It was said in Stockholm, at a kitchen table, at no charge to the Nigerian treasury. Every Nigerian who reads it can say it tonight, wherever they are, for the price of nothing. It is written for every faith and for those who have none left, because suffering in Nigeria has never checked anyone's religion before arriving. A prayer for Nigeria, from her suffering people Almighty God, Creator of all that is, hear us. We are the people of Nigeria. We did not come to You in a jet. We came as we are: hungry, tired, afraid, and still, somehow, hoping. We speak from Maiduguri and Makurdi, from Buguma and Bonny, from Kano and Kaduna, from Ajegunle and Aba, from Zamfara's hills and the creeks of the Delta. We speak from the mats, the pews, the shrines and the quiet corners where no one is watching, because You see us there as clearly as You see any king. We pray for the mother who put her children to bed without food tonight, and who will rise before dawn to find some tomorrow. Give her strength, Lord, and give her a country that does not make her beg for it. We pray for the father whose salary has not come, whose pension has not come, whose contract has not come, and who has stopped asking because asking has become a kind of shame. Restore his dignity, Lord, for it was never his to lose. We pray for the children in the forests and the camps, the ones taken from their schools and their farms, whose names the state has already forgotten. Bring them home, Lord, and judge those who priced their lives against a budget line. We pray for the farmer who cannot reach his field, the trader whose stall was bulldozed, the graduate who has applied a hundred times, the nurse and the doctor who left because staying meant watching patients die for want of what the minister's convoy cost. Lord, let there be work, and let the work be paid. We pray for the young, who are leaving in their thousands because they have looked at the future we built for them and declined it. Forgive us, Lord, for we did not build it; it was built over our heads and we were sent the invoice. We pray for the dead on the Lagos–Ibadan road, the Abuja–Kaduna road, the Benin bypass and every road that was paid for three times and built once. We pray for those who drowned when the dam was opened and no one was warned. We pray for those who died in the hospital because the generator had no diesel. Lord, receive them, for their country did not. We pray for our rulers, as we are commanded to, though it costs us something to do it. Not that they prosper, for they have prospered enough. We pray that they remember us. We pray that they feel, for one night, what it is to lie awake over a bill they cannot pay. We pray that the fear they spend our money to escape, in Riyadh and London and Paris, will turn and follow them home until they do something about it. We pray that their mind games fail, and that the people see them plainly. We pray against the lie that says a leader's piety is measured by the distance he travels to display it. Lord, You know the difference between a pilgrim and a passenger. Let our country learn it too. We pray for ourselves, that we do not lose our humanity in the struggle to survive. That we do not cheat the next man because we were cheated. That we do not give up on the ballot, the courts, the press, and the long, slow, unglamorous work of holding power to account, because that work is the only prayer that governments have ever actually answered. And we pray for Nigeria herself, this difficult, beloved, impossible country. Lord, we have not stopped loving her. We are only asking that she be allowed to love us back. We ask this in our own homes, in our own voices, with our own hearts, and at no cost to the public purse. Amen. Amin. Ase. The ledger of this prayer Cost of this prayer to the Nigerian taxpayer: nothing. No aircraft, no fuel, no estacode, no hotel, no convoy, no photographer, no press statement from an aide telling the country what we prayed for. We know what we prayed for. We were there. If a prayer said at home for free is worth less to God than one flown to Mecca at public expense, then every poor Nigerian has been praying in vain for sixty years, and that cannot be true. If it is worth the same, then the flight was never about the prayer. It was about the picture. And the picture was for us, to keep us looking up while our pockets were being emptied. Say the prayer tonight. Send it to the person next to you. Then, tomorrow, do the other prayer: ask the question, demand the receipt, keep the record, and vote. God has always answered that one through the hands of the people who said it. Kio Amachree writes Letters from Stockholm and is the founder of Worldview International, a diaspora accountability platform.

LETTERS FROM STOCKHOLM NOT ONE MORE PENNY WITHOUT A FULL ACCOUNTING Not one more penny should be committed to the Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway until Nigerians receive a full, independently audited account of its contracts, its financing and its expenditure to date. That is the whole of my demand. Everything that follows is the reason for it. Start with the number everyone quotes. The project was reported in 2024 at an estimated $13 billion. That is an estimate of the eventual cost, not evidence that $13 billion has been spent, and I will not pretend otherwise. But an estimate of that size, attached to a 700-kilometre road that will take more than a decade to finish, makes the demand for transparency more urgent, not less. Nobody hands a contractor a blank cheque of that order and asks for the receipts later. Except, it appears, Nigeria. The contract went to Hitech Construction, the company associated with Gilbert Chagoury, President Tinubu's long-standing ally, without an open public tender. Works Minister David Umahi has never denied this. He has said on record that there was no public advertisement and no open competitive bidding, and that the company was chosen by direct or restrictive procurement because of its expertise in concrete paving. Let us take him at his word. The procurement law may indeed permit a direct award in narrow circumstances. The question Nigerians are entitled to ask is why a project of this magnitude, the largest single road contract in the country's history, was treated as one of those narrow circumstances. Where are the competing prices? Where are the competing financing proposals? Where is the written justification that was placed before the Federal Executive Council, and when was it placed there? A minister's confidence in a contractor is not a substitute for a market test. Chagoury's history is why that scrutiny is not optional. In 2000 he was convicted in Switzerland of money laundering in connection with funds looted by the Abacha regime. He was fined one million Swiss francs and agreed to return $66 million to Nigeria. His lawyer has since said the conviction was expunged, and I record that as fairly as I record the conviction. But a public contract is not a private friendship. When a government awards its biggest-ever road to a man whose name appears in the Abacha recovery files, the burden of proof shifts to the government. It has not discharged it. Now consider what happened this week. On Tuesday the Senate President read a letter from the President asking the National Assembly to approve a supplementary external borrowing plan of $20.52 billion and €1.045 billion, roughly $21.7 billion in all, spread across roads, rail, power, ports and security. Sections 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the Lagos–Calabar highway are in it. So are two sections of the Sokoto–Badagry highway in Kebbi, the Kano–Kaduna metro rail, and a World Bank policy facility. Transport alone is said to account for about half of the package. This comes seven months after the same Assembly approved another $6 billion in external loans in March. The President's answer, published today, is that the coastal highway could add two per cent to GDP and create 250,000 jobs. Those are projections, and projections are not accounts. Before a single senator votes, the government must set out in writing what has already been financed on this road, by whom, on what terms, and what exactly the new money is for. If Section 1 was paid for from the budget and from the approvals already granted, say so and show the figures. If the contractor was supposed to bring private finance, as the minister once said, explain what happened to it. If the road has been rerouted inland, as has been reported, explain who decided, why, and what it did to the price. A loan request that cannot answer those questions is not a financing plan. It is a request for trust from a government that has given Nigerians no reason to extend it. Opposition figures have called the request a campaign fund in disguise. I report that as their claim, not as my finding. My own concern is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: when borrowing on this scale passes through a legislature that does not ask questions, into contracts that were never tendered, held by a friend of the President, in the months before an election, the conditions for abuse are complete whether or not abuse has occurred. That is a concern demanding investigation. It is not a finding that these loan proceeds have been diverted, and I do not assert one. Then there is the President's own movement. He left Abuja today for Saudi Arabia, for what the Presidency describes as Umrah and prayers for Nigeria's peace, stability and, by its own account, his re-election. Return is expected next week. The Presidency has not published the list of officials travelling with him. By the count of the Nigerian press this is his fifty-third foreign trip, and it comes only weeks after a four-week stay in Europe that overran the three weeks originally announced. Let us watch whether the announced itinerary holds, and whether Paris appears again on the way home. Any onward visit deserves a clear public explanation, because the man who brokered so much of this contracting lives there. I say plainly: a journey, on its own, proves nothing about money. I will not pretend it does. But a pattern of travel that coincides with a pattern of contracting is something a serious country would at least ask about. So here is what Nigerians should insist on, now, before the Assembly votes. One. Publish the contracts. Every agreement with Hitech and any associated company, every variation, every addendum, in full and online. Two. Publish the payments. Every naira and every dollar paid on this road to date, matched to certified work completed, section by section, kilometre by kilometre. Three. Identify the lenders. Name every financier, the interest rate, the tenor, the guarantees given by the Federal Government, and the repayment schedule that Nigerians will carry for the next thirty years. Four. Commission an independent forensic audit of the procurement, with international auditors who do not answer to the Ministry of Works, and publish the report before any further tranche is approved. Five. Apply the Isabel Precedent. Any Nigerian official, contractor or intermediary found to have benefited improperly from this project should expect to have assets traced and frozen in every jurisdiction where they sit, not only in Nigeria. Lawmakers who approve $21.7 billion without those five things are not legislators. They are signatories. And the people who will repay this money, the market woman in Oshodi and the mechanic in Aba and the teacher in Calabar whose grandchildren will still be servicing these loans, have every right to call them that to their faces: through peaceful protest, public petitions, Freedom of Information requests, and direct, relentless pressure on their representatives. Nothing here is personal. It is politics, and it is arithmetic. Everything I have described is either on the public record or clearly marked as a question. Nobody named in this letter has been convicted of anything in connection with this road, and the government denies any impropriety. The questions stand regardless. Nigeria's treasury belongs to Nigerians. No president, no contractor, no friend of a president and no political party has a private entitlement to it. Not one more penny without a full accounting. Nigeria belongs to Nigerians. Kio Amachree #Nigeria #Accountability #LagosCalabarHighway #PublicDebt #Transparency #GoodGovernance #KioSolution #LettersFromStockholm Sources: Sahara Reporters – Tinubu defends fresh borrowing TheCable – Atiku asks N'Assembly to reject loan request ThisDay – Tinubu seeks $20.5bn, €1.04bn loans Newsheadline247 – breakdown of the $21.7bn plan ICIR – Tinubu heads to Saudi for Umrah Voice of Nigeria – Saudi trip not medical, Presidency The Journal Nigeria – 53rd trip, entourage not published Arise – Umahi: Hitech got contract through direct procurement

LETTERS FROM STOCKHOLM NIGERIANS MUST RE-EDUCATE THEMSELVES: WE MUST NEVER ALLOW ANOTHER TINUBU TO RISE TO POWER By Kio Amachree It is important that Nigerians re-educate themselves. Read as much as possible, stimulate your minds, know your history, improve yourselves, and learn to distinguish right from wrong. Because in these evil times, the leadership of our country has become so furtive, so rotten and so destructive that it is attempting to normalise criminal behaviour, dishonesty and the lowest possible moral standards. We are living through a period in which corruption is defended, incompetence is celebrated, dishonesty is rewarded, and men who should be held accountable are instead treated as national heroes. Tinubu's apparent lack of intellectual depth, his questionable educational history and his upbringing are becoming more and more apparent in the way he conducts himself. His dishonesty, in my opinion, is ever present, and we have been overwhelmed by so many lies, contradictions and excuses from both the man and his inner circle that it has become clear to many Nigerians that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Something is seriously wrong, not only with Tinubu, a man whose rise to power has been surrounded by questions of deception, political manipulation and tactics that I consider totally unacceptable, but also with the people he has gathered around himself. You turn on your television or go online and there is Nyesom Wike mouthing off, talking absolute rubbish, loving the sound of his own voice, apparently convinced that he is the best thing since sliced bread. This month his office announced that, as far as the Minister is concerned, it is Tinubu till 2031. Not Nigeria till 2031. Tinubu. The arrogance, the self-importance, the complete absence of humility and the contempt for public opinion are astonishing. These are public servants who have forgotten that they are supposed to serve the people, not rule over them like medieval kings. Then consider what happened in September. The President left Abuja on 30 August for what the Presidency called a working vacation. He spent a week in London, moved on to Paris, skipped the United Nations General Assembly, and did not return to Nigeria until 29 September. Thirty days. During that time the Secretary to the Government of the Federation was deputed to represent him at official events while Nigerians asked a simple question: who is actually running the country? Section 145 of our Constitution exists for precisely this situation. When the President is on vacation or otherwise unable to discharge his functions, he transmits a letter to the National Assembly and the Vice President acts. It is not a humiliation. It is the law. Instead, the Senate President stood up in Akwa Ibom and told Nigerians there was no vacancy in Aso Rock, that what the President could not do at home he was doing abroad, and that instructions could be given over the internet, so why was anybody complaining. Here is a man whose constitutional responsibility includes holding the executive accountable, publicly explaining away a President who governed Nigeria for a month from a hotel suite in Paris. What has happened to the separation of powers? What has happened to the dignity of the National Assembly? What has happened to the principle that no man, not even the President, is above the law? The Senate President is not employed to be Tinubu's personal spokesman. He is there to defend the Constitution and protect the interests of the Nigerian people. Yet each time this administration is challenged, we hear another excuse, another justification, another attempt to convince Nigerians that what is plainly unacceptable should somehow be accepted as normal. Each and every one of that inner circle appears to me to be warped by power. They are bathed in darkness, seemingly believing that nothing will ever bring an end to their greed, their arrogance and their political domination. They have forgotten that history is littered with powerful men who believed themselves untouchable, only to discover that power is temporary and accountability can arrive when least expected. That is why I say Nigerians must begin preparing themselves intellectually, politically and morally for life after Tinubu. I do not believe this man will remain on the Aso Rock throne indefinitely. Whether through the ballot box in 2027, the natural passage of time or the end of his political career, his period in power will come to an end. And when Nigeria is finally free from this administration and its destructive political culture, we must never, ever allow such men to rise to the highest positions of power again. We must not simply replace Tinubu with another Tinubu wearing a different agbada. We must change the mentality that produces such leadership in the first place. We must stop worshipping money. We must stop confusing wealth with intelligence, political influence with wisdom, and arrogance with strength. We must stop treating every wealthy politician as a superior human being simply because he has managed to accumulate money, often without explaining where it came from. Education must mean more than collecting certificates. It must mean understanding history, developing independent thought, questioning authority, recognising dishonesty and having the moral courage to reject what is wrong even when it is politically convenient to remain silent. Nigerians must read about their own country. Read about the First Republic, the military dictatorships, the civil war, the destruction of our institutions, the struggle for democracy and the extraordinary men and women who once believed Nigeria could become one of the greatest nations on earth. Read about other countries too. Understand how successful societies built institutions, protected their constitutions, developed their economies and made public officials answerable to the law. An educated population that thinks independently is much harder to deceive, manipulate or intimidate. Sani Abacha should have been our final lesson. We should have emerged from that terrible period determined never again to surrender our country to men who consider public office their personal property. But apparently we did not learn enough. It has taken Tinubu and the extraordinary behaviour of his administration to awaken the minds of many decent Nigerians to the dangers of allowing political power to fall into the wrong hands. Perhaps that awakening will be the one positive legacy of this otherwise deeply troubling period in our national history. Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of intelligent people. It suffers from the elevation of the wrong people, the celebration of mediocrity and the willingness of educated men and women to abandon their principles in exchange for money, appointments and access to power. That must end. We must produce a new generation of Nigerians who cannot be bought with a bag of rice, a political appointment, a government contract or an envelope filled with money. A generation that understands that patriotism is not loyalty to a President, a political party, a tribe or a religious institution. Patriotism is loyalty to the country, its Constitution, its people and the generations yet unborn. I want Nigerians to rediscover their dignity, their intellectual curiosity and their moral courage. Because when this chapter of our history finally closes, the greatest tragedy would be to discover that we have learnt absolutely nothing from it. Never again should Nigeria allow dishonesty to become a qualification for leadership, corruption to become a profession, or political loyalty to become more important than competence and character. Abacha should have been our final lesson. Tinubu must be the last warning. Enough is enough. Kio Amachree President, Worldview International Stockholm, Sweden #LettersFromStockholm #KioAmachree #Nigeria #GoodGovernance #PoliticalAccountability #Education #RuleOfLaw #Nigeria2027 #Leadership #Democracy #TheKioSolution Sources: - [Akpabio: No Vacancy In Aso Rock, Tinubu Still Running Nigeria From Abroad – Leadership](leadership.ng/?p=708712) - [Tinubu Finally Returns to Nigeria After Weeks Abroad – Legit.ng](legit.ng/politics/1733500-br…) - [Tinubu departs Paris after 30 days abroad – The Nigeria Lawyer](thenigerialawyer.com/?p=4738…) - [Tinubu arrives Lagos after 4-week vacation abroad – Blueprint](blueprint.ng/?p=849051) - [Wike: "Tinubu till 2031" – Guardian Nigeria](guardian.ng/politics/wike-di…) - [Wike loyal to Tinubu, not nursing presidential ambition – TheCable](thecable.ng/?p=1234103)

THE TITANS: Nigeria's First Generation of Lawyers One Generation, One Atlantic They came up together, almost as a single generation. King's College Lagos produced Godfrey Amachree, Adetokunbo Ademola, H.O. Davies, Remilekun Fani-Kayode and Charles Onyeama. CMS Grammar School produced Taslim Elias, Rotimi Williams and T.O.S. Benson. Cambridge took Amachree to Pembroke, Ademola and Williams to Selwyn, Fani-Kayode to Downing. Oxford took Onyeama to Brasenose. The Inns of Court scattered them across Gray's Inn, where Amachree and Onyeama trained, Lincoln's Inn, Middle Temple and Inner Temple. Different colleges, different Inns. But they crossed the same Atlantic, read the same books, and came home to the same Lagos. The Men Godfrey Amachree. Pembroke College, Cambridge; Gray's Inn. First Nigerian Solicitor-General. First Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice. Queen's Counsel at thirty-nine. First Nigerian to chair the Football Association. First African Under-Secretary-General at the United Nations. Gowon's special representative to Washington during the civil war. Later one of the most successful private practitioners in the country. A man of impossible range. Taslim Elias. Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. Dean of Law at Lagos. Chief Justice of Nigeria. Then President of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, the first African to lead the World Court. Adetokunbo Ademola. First Nigerian Chief Justice, 1958 to 1972. Son of the Alake of Egbaland. Fourteen years of quiet authority at the top of the bench. With Elias, he was instrumental in founding the Nigerian Law School. Rotimi Williams. "Timi the Law." Selwyn College, Cambridge; Gray's Inn. Among the first Nigerian Queen's Counsel, the first Senior Advocate of Nigeria, co-founder of the first indigenous law firm, chairman of the 1977 Constitution Drafting Committee, first President of the Nigerian Bar Association. Awolowo's admiration made the nickname stick. Charles Onyeama. King's College Lagos, Achimota in Ghana, Brasenose College Oxford, Lincoln's Inn. Chief Magistrate of Lagos, High Court judge, Supreme Court Justice from 1964 to 1967, then the first Nigerian elected to the International Court of Justice, serving from 1967 to 1976. Father of Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama and the writer Dillibe Onyeama. H.O. Davies. Co-founder of the Lagos Youth Movement. President of the West African Students' Union in London. The only African lawyer on Kenyatta's defence team at the Mau Mau trial. Federal minister, Harvard fellow, author. T.O.S. Benson. First Federal Minister of Information and creator of the Voice of Nigeria. Vice President of the NCNC. Detained after the 1966 coup. Later Baba Oba of Lagos and Senior Advocate. Remilekun Fani-Kayode. King's College Lagos, Downing College Cambridge, where he topped the British Bar examinations across the entire Commonwealth. Called to Middle Temple in 1945. Queen's Counsel in 1960 at thirty-nine, the third and youngest Nigerian to receive it. Co-founded Thomas, Williams and Kayode in 1948, the first indigenous law firm. Deputy Premier of the Western Region. Detained by the British in 1952, alongside Williams and Bode Thomas, for the independence struggle. Nabo Graham-Douglas. The second Senior Advocate of Nigeria, conferred in 1975 alongside Rotimi Williams. Attorney-General of the Federation. A Rivers man who rose to the very top of the federal legal system. Richard Akinjide. Founded Akinjide and Company in Ibadan in 1955. President of the Nigerian Bar Association from 1970 to 1973. Minister of Education in the First Republic; Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the Second. Chuba Ikpeazu. Queen's Counsel. Founded Ikpeazu Chambers in Onitsha in 1946. One of the Eastern Region's most respected advocates. Obafemi Awolowo. Called to the Inner Temple in 1946. Founder of the Action Group, first Premier of the Western Region. A lawyer who built a political movement on legal and constitutional argument. Sobo Sowemimo. Middle Temple; later partnered with Fani-Kayode. His family gave Nigeria a Chief Justice in George Sodeinde Sowemimo. Ben Nwabueze. The constitutional scholar whose work on Nigerian federalism laid the intellectual foundation of the profession. What They Shared It was not just schooling. It was formation. A colonial education that was deliberately narrow and deliberately excellent: Latin, logic, rhetoric, the English legal canon. And a professional culture that treated the bar as a calling, not a trade. They argued before colonial judges and expected to win on merit. They wrote constitutions. They defended the accused when it was dangerous to do so. They built institutions that outlasted them: the Law School, the Bar Association, the first indigenous chambers, the bench itself. The Gap Set that generation beside what Nigeria's judiciary produces today and the gap is not subtle. It is structural. The titans were few because the system was small and the standards were absolute. Today's bench is large, politicised and compromised at every level, from the routine sale of judgments to the open capture of the courts by political interests. The profession that once gave the world a President of the International Court of Justice now produces judges who cannot explain their own rulings. The titans were not saints. They were ambitious, competitive and human. But they believed the law was bigger than any one of them. That belief is what is missing now. Not the intellect. The belief. The Kio Solution Nigeria cannot manufacture another Elias or Ademola by decree. But it can rebuild the conditions that produced them. Five demands: 1. Reinstate absolute standards at entry: a Nigerian Law School pass that means what it meant in 1962, with results published. 2. Appoint judges on merit alone, through an open process with published shortlists and reasons. 3. Make the NJC publish every disciplinary finding, by name, and remove any judge who takes a house, a plot or a favour from a politician. 4. Require every ruling of the superior courts to be written, reasoned and published online within thirty days. 5. Teach this generation's story in every law faculty, so a young Nigerian lawyer knows what the bar once was and what it is supposed to be. Nothing here is personal. It is the record. Nigeria belongs to Nigerians. Kio Amachree #LettersFromStockholm #TheKioSolution #NigerianJudiciary #GodfreyAmachree #TaslimElias #RotimiWilliams #NigeriaBelongsToNigerians #KioAmachree

Nigerians Haven't Stopped Judging Their President. They've Stopped Expecting It to Matter. The applause around Bola Tinubu is loud. It is also beside the point. By Kio Amachree Mr. Amachree is the founder of Worldview International, a Stockholm-based platform on Nigerian governance. STOCKHOLM — I did my national service in Nigeria during the Shagari years, inside the National Assembly and the presidency, close enough to power to learn how it sounds. It sounds like applause. Ministers are cheered, loyalty is declared, and the noise is mistaken, by the men at the centre of it, for the country's opinion of them. I think of that whenever I watch the ceremonies that now surround President Bola Tinubu. The politicians who praise him have reasons to. They have access, contracts, protection. The woman in Mushin who cannot afford a bag of rice has none of those things, and nobody is asking her to clap. So the question I keep returning to is not whether Nigerians respect their president. It is whether they still believe that what they think of him makes any difference. The answer, on the evidence, is that they mostly don't. In a survey conducted in 2024 and published last year, Afrobarometer found that 80 percent of Nigerians believed corruption had grown worse. Nine in ten rated the government's handling of it as poor. Only one in ten thought a citizen could report corruption without fear of retaliation. These are opinions, not verdicts. But a country in which nine out of ten people assume that honesty will be punished is not a country that expects to be heard. What it has instead is a system in which loyalty functions as insurance. I cannot see into the motives of every presidential ally, and I don't pretend to. But when a politician's usefulness to the campaign appears to count for more than the unanswered questions about public money that follow him, or her, Nigerians are entitled to draw their own conclusions. Take the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs. In January 2024, the minister, Betta Edu, was suspended after a memo came to light directing that 585 million naira, about $661,000 at the time, be paid into a private bank account. Her office said procedure had been followed. Mr. Tinubu ordered an investigation, and he was right to. By that April, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission said its inquiry into the ministry, which covered past officials as well as current ones, had recovered 32.7 billion naira and a further $445,000, roughly $29 million all told. Not all of that can fairly be attached to Ms. Edu, who denied any part in it. But money on that scale demands a public account of who took it and what happened to them. No such account has been given. On Aug. 22 this year, the presidency announced that Ms. Edu would serve as director of women mobilisation on Mr. Tinubu's 2027 re-election campaign. Asked the same day about her case, the commission told the newspaper Peoples Gazette that the investigation, nearly three years old, was still ongoing. A campaign spokeswoman later told Channels Television that who the party puts on its council is a party affair and not the public's business. An open investigation is not a finding of guilt. I would say the same of anyone. But a government that brings a suspended minister back into the front rank before it has explained why she was suspended is telling the country something about the going rate for accountability, and the country is listening. The Lagos–Calabar coastal highway tells the same story from another direction. In May 2024, Bloomberg reported that the project, then priced at $13 billion, had gone to Hitech, a company owned by Gilbert Chagoury, a businessman who has been close to Mr. Tinubu for decades. TheCable found that the president's son, Seyi Tinubu, was listed as a director of another Chagoury company. Atiku Abubakar, the opposition leader, called it a conflict of interest. The government calls the highway essential. Both things can be true. Thirteen billion dollars is a price, not a theft, and I will not pretend otherwise. But a government that asks Nigerians to bear the pain of subsidy removal and a collapsing naira owes them the paperwork on a contract that size: how it was awarded, what it costs per kilometre, who checked. The refusal to produce it is not neutral. It is a choice. Then there is the president's own past, which his defenders would prefer were off limits. In 1993, a federal court in Chicago ordered the forfeiture of $460,000 held in an account in Mr. Tinubu's name, in a civil case concerning the proceeds of heroin trafficking. There was no conviction. Mr. Tinubu has always denied wrongdoing. It was American money, not Nigeria's. All of that is so, and none of it makes the record disappear. What disturbs me is not that ordinary people shrug at this. It is that the lawyers, the accountants, the professors, the communications men do. They know the difference between a criminal conviction and a conflict of interest, between a court's silence and a clean sheet. They know, too, the difference between a deal under discussion and a deal done. In September 2023, the president's spokesman announced that a meeting in Abu Dhabi had lifted the Emirati visa ban on Nigerians and restored Emirates and Etihad flights with immediate effect. A U.A.E. official told CNN that nothing had changed. Emirates came back to Lagos in October 2024, more than a year later. The educated men who celebrated the first announcement never got round to correcting it. A university should teach a person to question power. When it teaches him to write its excuses instead, the degree is a disgrace. A system that pays for loyalty will always find people willing to sell it, and the ones who come cheapest are those who measure the nation's progress by the growth of their own accounts. Hospitals can rot and they will prosper. Their cheering is sincere. It just isn't about Nigeria. I should say where I stand. I am Yoruba on my mother's side and Kalabari on my father's. I owe Mr. Tinubu no deference on that account, and neither does anyone else. The attempt to recast criticism of the president as an assault on the Yoruba people collapses on the arithmetic: in 2023 he took more votes from the North-West than from the South-West, and he lost Lagos and Osun. His government is a national coalition, and the whole coalition owns its record. A hungry family gains nothing from sharing a surname with the man in Aso Rock. Nor is it fair to call Nigerians cowards. People did march, in August 2024, and Amnesty International recorded what was done to them for it. It is easy to demand courage from a safe distance. I write from Stockholm. I know what that distance is worth, and what it costs. The work is slower and duller than a protest: registering, voting, suing, reporting, asking the same questions after the news cycle has moved on. Nigerians deserve published findings, open contracts and consequences where guilt is proved. They deserve officials who can answer a question without treating the questioner as an enemy of the state. Exhaustion is not consent. And the applause of the people who are paid to applaud should never be mistaken for the voice of the country. Kio Amachree is a Swedish-Nigerian writer and the founder of Worldview International. He writes the Letters from Stockholm series.

LETTERS FROM STOCKHOLM ANOTHER FLIGHT, ANOTHER EXPLANATION: NIGERIANS DESERVE THE TRUTH By Kio Amachree Being Nigeria’s leader should come with a health warning. Five of our national leaders have died in office, yet we still behave as though asking whether a president is fit enough to do his job is an insult. Let us get the history right. Tafawa Balewa, Aguiyi-Ironsi and Murtala Muhammed were killed. Abacha died suddenly, while Yar’Adua died after a prolonged illness. They did not all die from poor health, and most were not elected. But we have experienced enough upheaval at the top to understand why the condition and availability of a president matter. Now Tinubu is preparing to leave Nigeria again. The Presidency says he is going to Makkah to perform Umrah and pray for the country, with his return expected next week. Atiku has alleged that he will make a brief appearance in Makkah before travelling to France. The announced itinerary does not include Paris, and the claim that this journey is for medical treatment has not been independently established. Nevertheless, I understand why people are suspicious. We have heard so many explanations for foreign journeys that another announcement produces questions before the aircraft has even left the ground. Why does Paris feature so regularly? Why are Nigerians expected to accept every explanation without asking what else might be involved? And why does the Presidency so often respond to concern with irritation? According to its own account, Tinubu left Nigeria on August 30 and returned on September 29, spending a week in London before moving to Paris. His vacation was extended. Meetings with Macron and business figures were announced, and those engagements should be acknowledged. But a month abroad is a considerable absence for the president of a country with Nigeria’s problems. He returned saying he was healthy and ready to work. I heard him. Nigerians are still entitled to ask questions. The concerns about his physical condition have not appeared from nowhere. His public falls and apparent difficulties with balance have attracted attention, including in a recent analysis published by the Council on Foreign Relations. That does not tell us what medical condition, if any, he has. It does explain why simply dismissing everyone as a political mischief-maker will not settle the matter. I cannot diagnose Tinubu from a television screen, and I will not attach diseases to him without evidence. What I can do is ask whether he has the stamina and capacity required to run Nigeria, and demand an honest answer. That is a reasonable question about any president. It becomes more pressing when foreign absences and concerns about health keep returning to the public conversation. I am approaching seventy myself. I know that age alone tells you very little about a person’s intelligence, judgement or usefulness. I also know that wanting to do something and having the strength to carry it through are different matters. Running Nigeria requires far more than turning up for a ceremony and signing the documents placed before you. The country needs sustained attention. It needs a president who can question his ministers, follow through on decisions, respond to emergencies and explain himself to the people. Ambition does not provide that capacity. Neither does a party nomination. What I find particularly offensive is the suggestion that Nigerians have no business asking. We pay for the aircraft, the security, the accommodation and the machinery of the presidency. We live with the consequences of its decisions. Of course we have a right to know whether the person in charge can discharge his responsibilities. We do not need every private detail of his medical history. We need credible information about anything that materially affects his ability to govern, how long he will be unavailable and who exercises authority during that period. We went through terrible uncertainty during Yar’Adua’s illness. He died in office in May 2010. Surely that experience should have taught us the importance of timely information and an orderly transfer of responsibilities when necessary. If Tinubu needs treatment, he should get it. I wish him good health. But the country must also be looked after. Nobody’s personal desire to remain president should take precedence over the proper functioning of government. And if medical treatment is part of a publicly funded foreign journey, the Presidency should explain its effect on his duties and account for the expenditure. Secrecy only encourages the rumours his spokesmen complain about. As for praying in Makkah, I respect his right to practise his religion. But Nigerians also need him at his desk, dealing with the responsibilities he campaigned to assume. People are praying in their homes, churches and mosques every day. They elected a government because prayer alone cannot provide security, functioning hospitals or food they can afford. There is something deeply wrong with a political culture in which ordinary people are expected to endure whatever healthcare is available while their leaders can board an aircraft whenever they need something better. Every leader who seeks care abroad should return determined to make comparable care available at home. Instead, we keep arguing about destinations. My position is straightforward. Publish the complete itinerary. Explain any changes. Give credible answers about fitness for duty. Follow the Constitution whenever a president cannot carry out his responsibilities. And before another election, let voters assess candidates with honest information about their capacity to serve. We should not be discovering after inauguration that the demands of the office exceed the strength of the person occupying it. Nigeria has capable people in every generation. We must stop behaving as though the country belongs to a small circle of men whose ambitions we are obliged to accommodate, whatever the cost. Mr President, your health deserves care. The affairs of Nigeria deserve your full attention. If you cannot give the country that attention, you owe Nigerians the honesty to say so. #LettersFromStockholm #KioAmachree #Nigeria #Tinubu #PresidentialAccountability #HealthTransparency #GoodGovernance #NigeriansDeserveBetter

LETTERS FROM STOCKHOLM ALPHA-BETA IS STILL COLLECTING. NOW TINUBU WANTS $21.7 BILLION MORE. By Kio Amachree 29 October 2026 There comes a point in the life of a nation when silence becomes almost as dangerous as the wrongdoing people are complaining about. Nigeria reached that point some time ago. Two things have brought me back to the subject this week. The first is a company most Nigerians have heard of but few have ever seen properly explained. The second is a loan request so large that it deserves to be read aloud, slowly, in every market and motor park in the country. Let me take them in order. Alpha-Beta Consulting is the private company that has monitored and managed Lagos State's internally generated revenue since Bola Ahmed Tinubu was governor. It is not a company that vanished when the controversy around it became uncomfortable. It is trading today. Its website is live, advertising accounting, information technology and revenue-management services. Its name still appears on the Lagos State electronic revenue platform as a service provider. So the company is real, the contract is real and the money is real. What has never been real is a public accounting. In 2020, Oladapo Apara, a former managing director of Alpha-Beta, went to court. He alleged that Tinubu had arranged for associates to hold interests in the company on his behalf, concealing his involvement while Alpha-Beta earned a lucrative commission on Lagos revenue. He alleged that the commission under the original arrangement was around ten per cent, and that billions of naira had been diverted through questionable transactions. These were not rumours from a social media account. They were allegations made by the company's own former chief executive, in legal proceedings, under his own name. And what became of them? The case was settled out of court in 2022. No judge ruled on whether the central allegations were true or false. No comprehensive public accounting followed. A private settlement ended a dispute between businessmen. It did not, and could not, answer the questions that belong to the public. A Carnegie Endowment study later found that Alpha-Beta continued to manage Lagos State's electronic tax payment system and continued to receive commissions, while the financial terms remained opaque. The study did not establish that Tinubu personally owned or profited from the company. I note that carefully, because I am not in the business of inventing verdicts. But opacity is itself a finding. When a company has sat on a government revenue contract for more than twenty years and nobody can tell you the terms, that is not an accident of paperwork. In December 2025, a former employee accused Alpha-Beta of under-deducting and under-remitting employee taxes, and a civil rights organisation petitioned the EFCC and ICPC to investigate. Alpha-Beta denied the allegations, calling them false and malicious, and said it had complied with its tax obligations. That dispute, too, deserves resolution on the evidence, in public. The people of Lagos State are entitled to know how much Alpha-Beta has been paid since 2002, what it actually does for that money, whether the commission represents value, and who its beneficial owners have been at every stage. Those are not hostile questions. They are the questions any auditor would ask on the first morning. Then there is the matter of the files. In July 2023, SaharaReporters reported allegations that operatives of the Department of State Services had removed files concerning Tinubu and his associates from the ICPC, the Code of Conduct Bureau and the EFCC. Both the ICPC and the Code of Conduct Bureau publicly denied it. I have seen no independently verified evidence that the seizure took place, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the denials do not close the subject. They open a different one. Nigerians need to be able to trust that an investigative file on a powerful man cannot be lifted, lost or quietly shelved because of who he is. The EFCC and the ICPC should be able to show, as a matter of routine, that evidence is preserved, that politically sensitive matters are handled independently, and that nothing is buried because it concerns the occupants of Aso Rock. A country cannot claim to be fighting corruption while its citizens are left guessing whether the powerful are even subject to the fight. Which brings me to the loan. On 27 October 2026, the President asked the National Assembly to approve approximately $20.52 billion and €1.045 billion in new external borrowing for 2026 and 2027. Call it $21.7 billion. Twenty-one billion, seven hundred million United States dollars. The government says the money will fund infrastructure, agriculture, health, education, security and other development programmes. Very well. Then publish the project list. All of it. The costs, the contractors, the locations, the loan agreements, the interest rates, the repayment schedules and the implementation arrangements. Let Nigerians see exactly what their children and grandchildren are being asked to repay, and to whom. Senator Victor Umeh has already asked the obvious question about previous approvals: where did that money go, and why are contractors still unpaid and budgeted projects still unexecuted? He deserves an answer before a single new dollar is approved. I cannot establish that this borrowing is intended to finance an election campaign, or to cushion anybody's landing if power changes hands in 2027. I say so plainly. But I also say this: when a government asks for $21.7 billion a few months before an election and declines to show the public a project-level ledger, it is the government that has created the suspicion, not the people who voice it. Secrecy is the seedbed of the very accusations the Presidency complains about. And this is where I turn from the politicians to the rest of us. What troubles me almost as much as the conduct of the political class is our own resignation. We complain endlessly. We circulate videos. We insult each other over tribe and religion. We argue about Obi, Atiku and Tinubu as though the future of the country were a football match. And while we shout, the basic questions of public money go unanswered. I have heard people say Nigerians are cowards. I do not accept that. Too many Nigerians have challenged corruption at real personal cost for the word to be fair. The truer diagnosis is that we have been trained. We have normalised secrecy. We have normalised patronage. We have normalised the idea that an elected official may treat the treasury as a family inheritance. And we have let ethnicity, religion and party loyalty stand in for the elementary standards of honesty and competence. I do not care whether the man in office is Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Ijaw or anything else. The treasury belongs to Nigerians. It does not belong to the tribe or the party of whoever happens to hold the keys. There is nothing patriotic about defending corruption because the accused is from your village. There is nothing democratic about exempting a man from questions because he won an election. So here is The Kio Solution. One. An independent, public examination of the Alpha-Beta contracts, payments and beneficial ownership from 2002 to date, with the findings published in full. Lagos State should open its books, and the EFCC and ICPC should state the status of every complaint and investigation concerning the company, subject only to genuine legal restrictions. Two. The National Assembly must examine the $21.7 billion borrowing request in public, project by project, and refuse approval until the complete project list, contractors, loan terms and repayment schedules are published. No ledger, no loan. Three. A public reconciliation of all previous external borrowing approvals under this administration, answering Senator Umeh's question: what was approved, what was drawn, what was spent, and on what. Four. Independent, protected custody of investigative files on politically exposed persons, with the EFCC, ICPC and Code of Conduct Bureau required to confirm publicly that such files are intact and that no agency has interfered with them. Five. A statutory bar on companies owned by, or connected to, serving public officials and their families receiving contracts funded by any of this borrowing, with beneficial ownership disclosed before award. And where money is found to have been diverted, the Isabel Precedent: freeze it, trace it, and bring it home. Nothing in this letter is personal. It is politics. Alpha-Beta is still collecting. The allegations about its history have never been resolved in public. And the President is asking the nation to sign for another enormous debt. Surely Nigerians are entitled to answers before they are handed another bill. The question is no longer whether Nigerians understand what is wrong. The question is whether they will insist that the people entrusted with public power finally account for what they have done with it. Nigeria belongs to Nigerians. Kio Amachree President, Worldview International Stockholm, Sweden #Tinubu #AlphaBeta #NigeriaDebt #LagosState #EFCC #ICPC #NationalAssembly #Accountability #TheKioSolution #LettersFromStockholm #NigeriaBelongsToNigerians #KioAmachree

From Africa's Richest Woman to a Gilded Cage in Dubai: Will Nigeria's Powerful Ever Face an Isabel dos Santos Moment? Isabel dos Santos was once celebrated as Africa's first female billionaire. Forbes valued her fortune at around $2 billion. As the daughter of José Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled Angola for 38 years, she was a fixture on international business stages and, for a time, untouchable. Today her assets are frozen in Angola, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. Interpol has issued a red notice for her arrest. Britain has sanctioned her as a "notorious kleptocrat," frozen her UK holdings and barred her from entering the country. A London court froze up to £580 million of her assets in a claim brought by Unitel, the Angolan telecoms company she once helped run. Dutch rulings stripped her of a Galp energy stake worth about €422 million. She now lives in Dubai, which has no extradition treaty with Angola. She also claims Russian citizenship, a fallback should Dubai ever stop being safe. She still posts poolside videos, but she cannot travel freely. Her children study in Britain, a country she is no longer allowed to enter. She denies all wrongdoing and calls it political persecution. Whatever the truth, her fall carries a lesson. How it happened Foreign courts did not bring her down on their own. The decisive blow came from home. Her father's handpicked successor, João Lourenço, turned on the family, and the Angolan state followed: prosecutors, the state oil company Sonangol, Unitel, and a formal request to Interpol. The 2020 Luanda Leaks gave investigators a documentary trail to follow. Western courts and governments acted, but only because Angola itself kept pushing. That is the part Nigerians should study. The reckoning started in Luanda, not in London. Can it happen in Nigeria? Nigerians are asking whether the powerful here, including those at the very top, could one day face the same fate. The honest answer is yes in theory, but not under present conditions. Immunity. Section 308 of the Constitution shields a sitting president from prosecution. Political cover. Allies of those in power rarely face serious action from our anti-corruption agencies, which too often behave as instruments of the incumbent. Weak cases abroad. Former petroleum minister Diezani Alison-Madueke was acquitted by a London jury in June 2026 after a 13-year investigation. Her defence argued that key documents had gone missing in Nigeria. Foreign courts cannot convict on evidence that Nigeria will not, or cannot, produce. Safe havens. Dubai and places like it still welcome politically exposed wealth, no questions asked. To be fair, allegations are not convictions. No sitting Nigerian leader has been found guilty of corruption, and all deny wrongdoing. What a reckoning would take • A change of power, and a successor willing to pursue cases against predecessors and allies rather than protect them. • Anti-corruption agencies that are independent in fact, not just on paper. • Investigative journalism and leaks that build an evidence trail across borders. • Western governments enforcing the sanctions and asset-freeze laws they already have. Angola shows that untouchable status can end quickly, and from within. The question for Nigeria is not whether it is possible. It is whether the system will ever allow it. What do you think? Will Nigeria ever see its own Isabel dos Santos moment? #IsabelDosSantos #Angola #Nigeria #Corruption #Accountability #LuandaLeaks #AssetRecovery #Governance #RuleOfLaw #NigerianPolitics #Kleptocracy #EFCC #Transparency #Africa

LETTERS FROM STOCKHOLM TINUBU AND HIS ENABLERS HAVE GONE TOO FAR. NIGERIA CANNOT CONTINUE LIKE THIS. By Kio Amachree 27 October 2026 It is getting to the point where I will soon advise the Nigerian people to withdraw their political consent from the Tinubu regime and to regard him and his enablers as enemies of everything a democratic Nigerian state is supposed to stand for. The contempt coming from this man, his family and his political associates is simply too much to stomach anymore. Laws are broken. The Constitution is treated as an inconvenience. The police and the security services are misused. The institutions built to protect Nigerians are being turned against the very people they exist to serve. As I wrote the other week, I regard the APC not as a political party but as an organisation whose conduct raises serious questions of criminality, abuse of power and institutional corruption. Its leaders behave as if winning an election placed them above accountability. That belief is the most dangerous thing in Nigeria today. I have studied political history long enough to recognise the danger of a political organisation becoming indistinguishable from the state. The judges at Nuremberg established that individuals remain accountable for crimes committed under the protection of political authority. I am not saying Nigeria is Nazi Germany. I am saying that political office must never become a shield. And before anybody accuses me of exaggerating, let us go through what has actually happened under this administration. Not rumour. Record. THE KILLING OF PROTESTERS In August 2024, Nigerians went onto the streets to protest against hunger, corruption and economic hardship. Amnesty International documented at least 24 people killed by police during the EndBadGovernance demonstrations. More than 1,200 were detained, minors among them. Children were arraigned on treason-related charges and only released after the images of them collapsing in court shamed the government into retreat. Imagine that. Children protesting hunger were treated as threats to the Nigerian state. A year later, Amnesty reported that not one member of the security forces had been prosecuted for those killings. Not one. What sort of government shoots hungry people, charges children with treason, prosecutes nobody, and then lectures Nigerians about democracy and the rule of law? THE SILENCING OF CRITICS Section 39 of the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression. Section 40 guarantees peaceful assembly. Yet journalists, activists and ordinary citizens are arrested or intimidated for criticising those in power, and the Cybercrimes Act has become the weapon of choice against political speech. In 2025, police assaulted journalists covering a peaceful protest in Port Harcourt. The National Broadcasting Commission banned Eedris Abdulkareem’s Tell Your Papa from the airwaves because it mocked the President and his son. I have spent my life in the music business. I have been in the company of artists who sang against presidents and prime ministers and nobody banned them. A government that cannot survive a song is a government that has already lost the argument. THE INSECURITY THEY SAY HAS ENDED My eyes nearly popped out when that lackey of a Senate President claimed that Tinubu had ended insecurity in Nigeria. What country is this man living in? Amnesty International reported in May 2025 that at least 10,217 people had been killed by armed groups in seven states during Tinubu’s first two years in office. Ten thousand, two hundred and seventeen human beings. In seven states only. In June 2025, gunmen slaughtered scores of people in Yelewata, Benue State. Villages are burned, communities displaced, people kidnapped for ransom as a matter of routine. And the Nigerian military, which is supposed to protect civilians, keeps killing them from the air: Human Rights Watch documented airstrikes in 2025, including one in Zamfara in which at least 20 people reportedly died. Where are the inquiries? Where are the prosecutions? Where is the compensation for the families? Section 14(2)(b) of the Constitution says the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government. Not a purpose. The primary purpose. The gunmen pull the triggers, not the President. But a government that fails this primary purpose year after year is politically accountable for that failure, and a Senate President who declares the problem solved while the bodies are still being counted is complicit in the lie. THE RIVERS STATE PRECEDENT In March 2025, Tinubu declared a state of emergency in Rivers State, suspended the elected governor, his deputy and the entire House of Assembly, and installed a retired admiral as sole administrator. Six months later, emergency rule was lifted and the elected officials returned, as if nothing had happened. In December 2025, the Supreme Court dismissed the challenge brought by eleven PDP states, by a majority of six to one. The judgment affirmed the President’s power to declare an emergency and, in the majority’s reading, to suspend elected officials for a limited period. One justice dissented. Eminent lawyers, including Femi Falana, insist the judgment confers no power to remove a governor at all. The lawyers can argue over what the court said. I will say what any citizen can see: a precedent now exists under which a President of Nigeria can displace an elected state government, and the next occupant of Aso Rock will not be shy about using it. Should one man be able to suspend the elected government of a state in a federal democracy? I say no. The Constitution must be amended to say no in plain words, so that no court ever has to guess again. THE HIGHWAY NOBODY TENDERED Now to the money. The Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway, a project running into trillions of naira, was awarded to Hitech Construction, a company associated with the Chagoury business interests, whose relationship with Tinubu goes back decades. There was no open competitive tender. That is not my allegation. It has been reported for two years and never denied in substance. Questions over procurement approvals, costs, financing, route changes and conflicts of interest remain unanswered. The Public Procurement Act makes competitive bidding the rule. Exceptions exist, but they must be justified and documented. So I ask David Umahi and Bola Tinubu a simple question. Where are the documents showing that this contract was awarded in full compliance with Nigerian law? Publish the contracts. Publish the financing. Publish the cost variations and the approvals. Let independent auditors examine the whole project. If everything is legitimate, what is there to hide? I am not prepared to accept that friendship with the President is a procurement procedure. Nigerians are entitled to proof that it was not. THE PARDONS In October 2025, Tinubu granted clemency to 175 people. The list included convicted drug traffickers, illegal miners, kidnappers and murderers, among them a woman sentenced to death for killing her husband. Amnesty International warned that pardoning people convicted of human rights crimes entrenched impunity and denied victims any hope of justice. The outrage was so loud that the Presidency was forced to revise the list and withdraw clemency from dozens of names. Think about what that tells you. The President of the Federal Republic signed off on a list of drug traffickers and killers without, by his own spokesman’s account, having looked at it properly, and only retreated when Nigerians shouted. That is not leadership. That is a man signing whatever is placed in front of him. Clemency is a constitutional power. Possessing a power does not make every use of it defensible. THE DEBT While all this goes on, the Debt Management Office records Nigeria’s total public debt at roughly 159 trillion naira as of March 2026, against about 87 trillion when Tinubu took office. Exchange rates account for part of that. Borrowing accounts for the rest. The question is not the number. The question is what Nigerians got for it. Where are the hospitals, the schools, the electricity, the safe roads, the secure villages? Why are ordinary Nigerians told to make sacrifices while the political class flies abroad on holiday? THE FOREIGN QUESTION I have repeatedly questioned the relationship between Tinubu and foreign interests, particularly the United States. The documented record is the 1993 civil forfeiture in Chicago, in which Tinubu surrendered funds without any criminal charge or conviction. Beyond that record, it is my personal belief, and I state it as belief and not as fact, that deeper intelligence and political relationships may exist that Nigerians have never been told about. I have even wondered whether Tinubu serves interests that would prefer Nigeria weak and dependent. I cannot prove that and I do not pretend otherwise. But any credible evidence of improper foreign influence over the Nigerian presidency deserves independent investigation, because the alternative explanation for the state of our country is hardly more reassuring: incompetence, patronage and a total absence of accountability. THE ENABLERS The Presidency is not a family business. Nigeria does not belong to Bola Tinubu, his wife, his children, his friends or the APC. It belongs to more than 200 million Nigerians, including the millions who did not vote for him. Where is the National Assembly? Where is the oversight, the investigation, the legislator prepared to challenge Aso Rock instead of applauding it? A Senate that behaves as an extension of the executive has abandoned its democratic function, whatever party its members belong to. The same goes for the judiciary, the police, the DSS and every other institution that exists to serve Nigerians rather than the government of the day. Every official who looks away now should remember that the record is being kept, and that the day of lawful reckoning always comes. 2027 I have said before that the January 2027 election will be a defining moment. If there is credible evidence of manipulation, Nigerians must challenge it through every lawful and peaceful means available. Civil disobedience is a legitimate tradition of peaceful resistance to injustice, and I believe it will become a feature of Nigerian life if the public loses confidence in that election. INEC must understand that Nigerians are entitled to transparent elections and accurate results. Aso Rock must understand that power is not a permanent entitlement. The APC must understand that winning an election does not give any government the right to disregard the Constitution or silence its critics. THE KIO SOLUTION One. An independent judicial inquiry into the August 2024 protest killings, with named officers prosecuted and victims’ families compensated. Two. Publication of every Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway contract, financing agreement, approval and cost variation, followed by a forensic audit by auditors with no Nigerian political connections. Three. A constitutional amendment to Section 305 stating in plain words that no state of emergency may suspend or remove any elected official. Four. Repeal of the speech provisions of the Cybercrimes Act and enactment of a Dele Giwa Law protecting journalists and critics from politically ordered arrest, detention and torture. Five. The Isabel Precedent: publication of the asset declarations of the President, Vice-President, ministers and governors, and cooperation with foreign authorities in tracing and recovering assets held abroad by Nigerian officials. I am ashamed of what Nigeria has become in the eyes of the world. A country with this much talent, this many resources and this much potential should be leading Africa, not explaining itself. I refuse to accept that Nigerians cannot produce better leaders. There are thousands of competent, honest, patriotic Nigerians who could run this country far better than the people currently in charge. What we lack is not talent. What we lack is a system that rewards it. I have spent much of my life studying governments and the rule of law. I did not spend those years learning about democracy to stay silent while my own country is dragged into institutional decay. I want a Nigeria where the Constitution means something, where public officials can be prosecuted, where the police protect rather than intimidate, where contracts are awarded in the open and where no President, minister, governor or godfather is above the law. Nothing I write is personal. It is politics. Nothing in this article asserts that any person named has been convicted of a crime. Allegations are reported as allegations, court findings as court findings, and my own beliefs as my own beliefs. Those distinctions are what separate accountability from slander, and I keep them deliberately. Tinubu and his enablers must be held to account by constitutional, democratic and peaceful means. Four more years of this would be intolerable. We have already lost too many lives, too much money and too much respect. Enough is enough. Nigeria belongs to Nigerians. Not to Tinubu. Not to his family. Not to the APC. And Nigeria must come first. Kio Amachree President, Worldview International Letters from Stockholm #Tinubu #APC #EndBadGovernance #RiversState #LagosCalabarHighway #Chagoury #NigeriaDecides2027 #TheKioSolution #LettersFromStockholm #NigeriaBelongsToNigerians #KioAmachree Sources: - [Supreme Court Upholds President's Power To Declare Emergency Rule — Channels TV](channelstv.com/2025/12/15/su…) - [Supreme Court confirms Tinubu's power to sack governors — Peoples Gazette](gazettengr.com/?p=431506) - [Fagbemi hails Supreme Court ruling; Falana's contrary reading — Arise TV](arise.tv/fagbemi-hails-supre…) - [Amnesty faults Tinubu's pardons — Channels TV](channelstv.com/2025/10/13/re…) - [Tinubu cancels pardon for drug offenders, kidnappers after outcry — AllAfrica/Premium Times](allafrica.com/stories/202510…)

LETTERS FROM STOCKHOLM BIAFRA, BIGOTRY AND 2027: NIGERIA CANNOT BUILD ITS FUTURE ON INHERITED HATRED By Kio Amachree An Igbo candidate should have to defend his record, his policies and his competence. He should not have to stand trial for Biafra before Nigerians will consider voting for him. That is the question Nigeria must confront as we approach 2027. Will Peter Obi be judged on what he proposes to do for the country, or will some politicians once again exploit ethnicity and religion to prevent a serious discussion about leadership? This is not an endorsement of Obi. Every candidate deserves scrutiny. But scrutiny becomes bigotry when a man’s ancestry is treated as sufficient reason to disqualify him. Anti-Igbo hostility in parts of northern Nigeria has a documented and deeply disturbing history. Yet the North is not one people with one opinion. Its communities, political traditions and religious identities are diverse. Any argument that begins by treating every northerner as an enemy repeats the collective thinking we should be challenging. The historical sequence matters. The anti-Igbo massacres of 1966 preceded Biafra’s declaration of independence in 1967. Scholarship documents how the January coup became interpreted as an Igbo conspiracy and how suspicions of ethnic domination contributed to violence against civilians. We cannot honestly explain all anti-Igbo hostility as a response to separatism when mass violence helped produce the conditions in which separation occurred. Nor did this dangerous thinking disappear with the war. In June 2017, northern youth organisations demanded that Igbo residents leave northern Nigeria. United Nations experts condemned the ultimatum and accompanying messages calling for attacks on Igbo people and their property. These were threats against citizens because of their ethnicity. Professor Ango Abdullahi, speaking as a Northern Elders Forum spokesman, supported the demand and explicitly linked it to Biafran agitation. His position demonstrated how a prominent elder could use separatist politics to justify collective exclusion. But other northern leaders opposed the ultimatum, and consultations involving northern and Igbo representatives helped secure its suspension. The record contains both incitement and resistance to it. We should therefore be precise about older people. Some influential elders have promoted exclusionary positions. That does not establish that older northerners generally hate Igbos, or that younger northerners are automatically more tolerant. I found no reliable comparative survey proving either proposition. Indeed, the 2017 episode involved organisations identifying themselves as youth groups. Age alone will not rescue Nigeria. A younger politician can inherit the prejudices and practices of an older patron. Generational change becomes meaningful when it changes how power is exercised. For Obi, the electoral danger is that legitimate arguments about his record could become entangled with historical suspicion. Opponents could attempt to associate his candidacy with separatism merely because he is Igbo, or present support for him as disloyalty to another community. That is a plausible political risk, rather than a measured prediction of how northern voters will behave. It would also be wrong to explain every northern vote against Obi as ethnic prejudice. Voters can disagree with his economic proposals, question his achievements, prefer another candidate or distrust his political alliances. Those are legitimate democratic judgments. The distinction is whether the argument concerns his fitness for office or assumes that an Igbo person is inherently unfit to hold it. Recent reporting places Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso together in the Nigeria Democratic Congress’s 2027 presidential campaign. That partnership demonstrates an attempt to build support across regional boundaries. It does not establish that prejudice has disappeared, or that either politician can deliver the automatic loyalty of an entire population. There is another danger: treating prejudice as the only obstacle while neglecting organisation, policy and opposition divisions. Reporting in October describes continuing disagreements over a common opposition ticket. Electoral outcomes will depend on those practical political questions as well as identity. Meanwhile, the urgent questions facing northern communities remain education, livelihoods and physical security. UNICEF-supported research in Katsina, Zamfara and Niger states documents how armed conflict, banditry and community violence disrupt schooling and jeopardise children’s futures. These are concrete failures with consequences that last far beyond an election. A child denied education is not evidence of an inferior people. That child is evidence of an unmet obligation. Poverty is not a cultural destiny. Ignorance is not an inherited northern characteristic. These conditions demand investment, functioning institutions and accountable leadership. The exclusion of young people from meaningful decisions deserves particular attention. Their role in public life should extend beyond campaign crowds and online arguments. Across Nigeria, democratic renewal requires space for younger people to contest office, influence party decisions, scrutinise spending and help shape education and employment policy. But responsibility for fixing these problems cannot simply be transferred to the young. Governors, legislators, ministers, party leaders and public officials already hold power and control resources. They must answer for their performance. We also need honesty about what is sometimes called “orchestrated insecurity”. Persistent violence understandably produces suspicions about complicity, protection and profiteering. However, a claim that particular politicians organise attacks requires specific evidence. Failure to stop insecurity does not, by itself, prove that every incident was deliberately arranged. The proper demand is for independent investigation wherever credible allegations identify sponsors, collaborators or officials obstructing justice. Security expenditure should be scrutinised, victims protected and proven wrongdoing prosecuted. Unanswered questions must lead to investigation rather than harden into unsupported certainty. Ethnic blame offers no solution to these failures. An Igbo neighbour did not become responsible for a missing school budget because a separatist made an inflammatory speech. A Hausa farmer does not become responsible for a politician’s misconduct because they share a language. Ordinary Nigerians should not be made to carry the guilt of powerful people they neither control nor benefit from. The same standard applies to Obi and every other presidential contender: explain how you will protect communities, improve learning, create economic opportunity and make public money accountable. Answer difficult questions. Accept scrutiny. Earn support. Nigeria cannot keep asking its citizens to inherit the quarrels of 1966 while abandoning the obligations of 2026. Biafra must be studied honestly. Bigotry must be challenged wherever it appears. Leadership must be judged by competence, integrity and results. And citizenship must mean that every Nigerian belongs without having to seek permission from an ethnic gatekeeper.

Dangerous Demon in Love written Written by Kio Amachree 2026

THE GROVELLING IS DRAGGING NIGERIAN POLITICS INTO THE GUTTER By Kio Amachree Letters from Stockholm Peter Obi in the Sultan's palace. Peter Obi at the mosque. Peter Obi waiting his turn in yet another reception room. Watching the pictures, one question would not leave me alone: why does seeking public office in Nigeria require so much grovelling? Why must a man who wants to run the country spend the campaign making other men feel important? I understand the value of meeting people and respecting their customs. What I am tired of is a political culture in which candidates audition for the approval of powerful men instead of presenting themselves for examination by ordinary citizens. I learnt a long time ago that in Nigeria everyone is a big man. Everyone is chairman of the board. Everyone expects recognition, flattery and an elaborate acknowledgment of his importance before you are allowed to get down to business. Bring a serious idea into that room and you will spend half your time nursing wounded egos before anyone asks whether the idea is any good. This is how progressive people get dragged into the gutter. A candidate arrives with a programme and soon finds himself negotiating personalities, observing endless protocol and making promises that will one day compromise his ability to govern. What exactly are we electing a president to do? Manage Nigeria, or spend four years repaying the people who let him into their drawing rooms? My concern is not really Peter Obi. He happens to be the man whose pictures prompted these thoughts. The same questions should be put to every candidate, whatever his party, religion or ethnic background. A Christian can visit a mosque sincerely. A Muslim can visit a church sincerely. Nobody has to abandon his convictions to show respect for another person's faith, and no photograph can tell us what is in a man's heart. But voters are entitled to ask about the theatre. Why must faith become another campaign stage? Why should a candidate feel obliged to perform religious belonging in order to prove he can govern fairly? I want a president whose commitment to Muslims, Christians and everyone else is shown through equal protection, competent government and respect for their rights, and who goes on showing it long after the cameras have gone. The same goes for the traditional institutions. Respecting a ruler's customs is one thing. Allowing political gatekeepers to behave as though they own the votes of everyone in their community is another. A citizen's vote belongs to the citizen. It is not palace property. And beneath all this deference lies a dangerous bargain. If a powerful man believes he delivered your presidency, what will he expect when you arrive? An appointment? A contract? Protection from investigation? The right to telephone you and overrule a minister? A candidate must be able to say, before he takes office: I respect you, but I cannot promise you a share of the government. Otherwise the obligations begin before the oath is sworn. We all know what follows. The candidate who waited patiently in your reception room becomes president and your calls go unanswered. The host feels used. The president resents being reminded of his dependence. What was presented as friendship is exposed as a transaction. And the ordinary voter is still waiting for electricity, security and a hospital that works. What troubles me most is how little room this leaves for serious thought. We need candidates explaining how they will modernise agriculture, fix the schools, attract investment, create jobs and make public institutions function. Instead the attention goes to who received whom, who endorsed whom, who knelt, who bowed and whose ego was properly attended to. There are times when Nigerian politics seems to demand that an educated man use only half his brain. Speak with precision and you are called arrogant. Explain a hard problem honestly and someone tells you ordinary people will not understand. Ordinary Nigerians understand hardship perfectly well. They deserve politicians willing to explain solutions without insulting their intelligence. Accessibility does not require deceit. Humility does not require surrendering your judgment. Respect does not require becoming somebody's political servant. I want candidates who can enter any community with courtesy, speak honestly and leave without having mortgaged their independence. Nigeria needs leaders with the confidence to say what they can deliver, what they cannot and what nobody has the right to demand of them. If a man must spend his whole campaign pretending, flattering and incurring debts he cannot honour, then tell us: on which day does the honest government begin? #Nigeria #Leadership #Accountability #NigerianPolitics #LettersFromStockholm

I AM AN ANGRY DEMOCRAT By Kio Amachree Letters from Stockholm One of my followers called me a revolutionary the other day. I smiled to myself, because that is about as far from the truth as you can get. I am not a revolutionary. I am a democrat. An angry one. My anger comes from disgust at the status quo. I find the leadership of Nigeria wanting, and what makes it worse is knowing how many Nigerians there are who would make excellent leaders of government and will never be allowed near it. I come from a conservative background, but I have socialist leanings. I do not believe that an accident of birth gives a man the right to the top spot in life. I believe in merit, hard work, education and knowing right from wrong. Whatever your surname, your wealth, your tribe or your connections, you should have to prove that you can do the job. I also believe that a country's wealth should serve its people. Education, healthcare, security and the chance to earn a decent living are the foundations of government, not favours. Nigerians should not have to beg politicians for what their taxes and their national resources ought to provide as a matter of course. But a revolution? In a country as ethnically divided as Nigeria, I do not believe a revolution would work the way some people imagine. What begins in one part of the country would be rejected in another, where people hold different beliefs, answer to different institutions and owe different political loyalties. Anger alone cannot hold such a country together. The military managed sudden changes of government only because it had the guns and the tanks to force its decisions down the throats of the Nigerian people. That is hardly a model we should wish to repeat. I do, however, believe that something drastic must be done to establish true democracy. Holding elections is not enough if those who emerge from them behave as though the country belongs to them, and the institutions meant to restrain them simply fall into line. In my view we are drifting dangerously towards autocracy. When a political system allows a leader to capture power and then dismantle the checks on his authority, Nigerians should question the system itself, not just the man. We cannot keep placing our faith in arrangements that leave us so exposed to abuse. Take the National Assembly. In my opinion it has become a total waste of the enormous resources spent maintaining it. It behaves like a rubber stamp, filled with men and women who seem far more interested in making money and enjoying the privileges of office than in defending the people who elected them. Where is the serious scrutiny? Where is the determination to challenge executive excess? Why should Nigerians go on paying so much for representatives so reluctant to represent them? I want the present arrangement dismantled through a lawful constitutional process and replaced with a smaller, cheaper and more accountable legislature. An institution that actually monitors the executive, scrutinises public spending and protects the Constitution. Its members should understand that their duty is to the Nigerian people, and they should face consequences when they betray it. The Constitution itself needs rewriting through a genuinely representative civilian process. Nigerians must have a meaningful say in the rules under which they live, the powers government exercises and the protections citizens can actually enforce. We need a constitution fit for Nigeria in 2026 and beyond. One that addresses our diversity, makes public office accountable and prevents any president from treating the country as a personal possession. None of this requires a gun. It requires peaceful public pressure, political organisation and constitutional reform. It requires Nigerians to work together across the very divisions that politicians have found so useful for keeping us apart. My anger comes from knowing that Nigeria can do better. We have the people, the intelligence and the ability. What we lack is a system that consistently brings capable people into government and holds them to account once they get there. If demanding that makes me a revolutionary in somebody's eyes, so be it. I call it expecting my country to be properly governed. That is not revolution. That is democracy, and I am angry that we still do not have it. Nigeria belongs to Nigerians. #TheKioSolution #LettersFromStockholm #NigeriaDecides2027 #ConstitutionalReform #NationalAssembly #Accountability #DiasporaVoice #KioAmachree

La-Cram, La-Pour: How Nigeria Educated Itself Into a Zombie State� Letters from Stockholm, by Kio Amachree I watch them on television. I listen to them at podiums. Ministers, governors, senators, heads of agencies, men who hold the fate of over two hundred million people in their hands. And one thought keeps entering my head, and it will not leave. These men crammed. They memorised the book. They memorised the lecture. They memorised the past questions, the cut-off marks, the definitions, the dates. They can recite. What they cannot do is understand. And a man who can recite but cannot understand is a dangerous thing to hand power to, because he will perform the appearance of a job without ever grasping what the job is for. Nigerians have a phrase for it that needs no translation at home: la-cram, la-pour. Cram it in, pour it out, forget it by Monday. A Nigerian doctoral researcher writing in TheCable put it bluntly: our system teaches students that learning means being told facts, remembering them, and saying them back flawlessly to someone else. Professor Peter Okebukola, a former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, has said the same thing in his own way, that a curriculum overloaded to cover the syllabus produces cramming, not thinking. I was not educated in Nigeria. I was sent to England at eight, and from Holmewood House to Eton to Wharton I was taught by men and women whose job was to make me argue, to make me defend a position and then attack it, to make me ask why before I was allowed to say what. My history master at Eton did not want me to tell him what happened in 1832. He wanted me to tell him why it mattered and whether the textbook was wrong. That is the difference. That is the whole difference. One system produces a mind. The other produces a parrot with a certificate. And then I came home for National Service and sat in the National Assembly and the Presidency and watched the parrots run the country. Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying Nigerians are stupid. I am saying the opposite. Nigerians are among the most naturally intelligent people on earth, and the proof is what they do the moment they leave: they run hospitals in Houston, banks in London, engineering firms in Stockholm. The raw material is magnificent. The factory is broken. Look at what the factory is producing. In the 2025 UTME, 1.5 million of the 1.9 million candidates, more than 78 per cent, scored below 200 out of 400. Only 12,414 candidates, 0.63 per cent, scored 300 or above. In 2024 the share below 200 was 76 per cent. In 2022 it was 78 per cent. JAMB itself has published that since computer-based testing began in 2013, the share of candidates scoring 200 and above has swung between 11 and 34 per cent. Read that again. In the best year on record, two out of three candidates could not reach half marks. This is not a bad year. This is the system working exactly as designed. In the 2026 WASSCE for school candidates, released this summer, 61.54 per cent obtained five credits including English and Mathematics. Sixty-one per cent sounds respectable until you notice that WAEC withheld the results of 167,486 candidates, 8.59 per cent of everyone who sat, over examination malpractice. Nearly one in twelve. The fake question papers, the "miracle centres", the parents who pay for answers: that is cramming's natural child. When the certificate is the goal and understanding is irrelevant, cheating is not a deviation from the system. It is a shortcut through it. And beneath the exam halls there is a deeper rot. The World Bank's estimate is that more than 70 per cent of Nigerian ten-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple sentence. UNICEF and the World Bank put foundational literacy among children aged seven to fourteen at roughly one in four. Even among children who are in school at the right age, only four in ten can read at a basic level. A UNICEF official in Kano said it without decoration: on top of the 10.5 million out-of-school children, 70 per cent of the children who are in school are not learning. So picture the pipeline. UNICEF counts 10.2 million primary-age children and 8.1 million junior-secondary-age children out of school entirely. The Minister of Education disputes the figure and says a full count will show seven to eight million; I note the dispute and I note that even his number is a catastrophe. Of the children who get in, most cannot read by ten. Of those who reach the exam hall, three in four cannot score half marks. And of the survivors who crawl through to a university, the universities themselves teach by dictation and test by regurgitation. Now ask yourself what kind of man emerges at the top of that pipeline forty years later, clutching his certificates, and is handed a ministry. He is a man who has never once been rewarded for asking why. Every reward in his life came from reproducing what he was told. So when he is appointed to run power, or petroleum, or health, he does not ask what the ministry is for, what the numbers mean, what the consequences will be in five years. He asks what he is supposed to say. He reads the speech his aides wrote. He signs what is placed in front of him. He memorises the talking points and pours them out at the press conference. And when the policy fails, as it must, he is genuinely bewildered, because he did everything correctly. He said all the right words. That is the zombie. Not a stupid man. A man who was trained from the age of five never to think, and who now holds power he does not understand over jobs he cannot see. This is why I have argued, and will keep arguing, for a law requiring verified educational qualifications and certified good health before anyone can be President. But I now understand that is only the floor. A verified certificate from a cramming factory still proves nothing about whether the holder can think. We must fix what the certificate measures. The Kio Solution has five demands. One. A national foundational literacy emergency. Every Nigerian child reads with comprehension by age ten, measured annually by an independent body, with results published state by state so that governors can be shamed by name. Two. End the memory exam. WAEC, NECO and JAMB must be directed, by law, to shift the weight of every paper toward reasoning, application and argument, with an independent review of question papers every year. If the exam rewards thinking, the classroom will follow. If it rewards cramming, nothing else we do will matter. Three. Retrain the teachers before you reprint the textbooks. A curriculum is only as good as the person delivering it. A national teacher-retraining programme in questioning, discussion and problem-based methods, funded from the federal budget and tied to pay progression. Four. Treat examination malpractice as organised crime. Prosecute the miracle centres, the paper sellers and the officials who feed them, and publish the convictions. A country that lets one in twelve results be withheld for cheating every year has told its children exactly what it values. Five. A thinking test for public office. Any nominee for ministerial or agency headship should face a published, televised confirmation hearing in which senators ask them to explain, in their own words, what the ministry does, what its budget is, and what they would change. No notes. No aides. If they cannot explain the job, they cannot have the job. Nigeria does not have a shortage of certificates. It has a surplus of certificates and a famine of understanding. We have built a country run by men who can recite the constitution but cannot tell you what Section 145 is for. We did this to ourselves, one past-question booklet at a time. Nothing I write here is personal. It is politics. And the politics of a nation begins in the classroom, where we decide whether to raise citizens or parrots. Nigeria belongs to Nigerians. #TheKioSolution #LettersFromStockholm #NigeriaEducation #LaCramLaPour #JAMB #WAEC #OutOfSchoolChildren #LearningPoverty #NigeriaShameOnYou #DiasporaVoice #KioAmachree Sources: • UTME 2025 – 1.5 million candidates scored below 200 – JAMB (Premium Times) • Nearly 80% of 2025 UTME candidates score below 200 (ICIR) • UTME Results: Over 70% of candidates score below 200, says JAMB – 2024 (Peoples Gazette) • JAMB full statement: comparison of UTME results since inception of CBT in 2013 • WAEC releases 2026 WASSCE results, 61.54% pass rate (Premium Times via AllAfrica) • WAEC releases 2026 WASSCE results – 167,486 withheld for malpractice (The Guardian Nigeria) • Kano, Katsina, Jigawa have 16% of Nigeria's 10.2 million out-of-school children – UNICEF (AllAfrica) • Nigeria's education faces challenge of retaining students – UNICEF: 10.2m primary and 8.1m junior secondary out of school (The Guardian Nigeria) • Literacy, insecurity and Nigeria's children – minister disputes out-of-school figure (Daily Trust) • Nigeria's 37m children can't read, understand simple text – World Bank (BusinessDay) • UNICEF: 70% of schoolchildren in Nigeria not getting quality education (TheCable) • La-cram, la-pour and higher education (TheCable) • Experts advocate inclusion of critical thinking in Nigeria's education curriculum – Okebukola (BusinessDay) See less

ASO ROCK IS NOT A FAMILY BUSINESS By Kio Amachree Letters from Stockholm I am increasingly disturbed by the political role Oluremi Tinubu is carving out for herself. Nigerians elected her husband President. They did not elect his wife to share his authority, and they did not elect his children to form an additional layer of government. The title of First Lady carries visibility and influence, but it comes with no independent executive powers under our Constitution. That distinction matters when the President’s wife is discussing international affairs with ambassadors and supplying vehicles for the ruling party’s election machinery. On 22 October, Mrs Tinubu met China’s ambassador, Yu Dunhai. China’s Foreign Ministry says their discussion covered bilateral relations, trade concessions, African security issues and mining cooperation. These are serious subjects involving Nigeria’s economic and strategic interests. I have no objection to an ambassador paying her a courtesy visit. What I want explained is the capacity in which she speaks when the conversation moves into foreign policy. Was she conveying an authorised government position? Was our Foreign Ministry involved? What record exists of the discussion? That meeting alone does not prove she was standing in for her husband. But Nigerians should not have to guess where her personal influence ends and the authority of their government begins. The vehicles raise an even more immediate question. Mrs Tinubu has confirmed donating vehicles to the APC youth wing for mobilisation ahead of the 2027 election. Seven new Toyota Prado SUVs were displayed by the party’s youth leader, Dayo Israel, in a post he subsequently deleted. Her meeting with the youth leaders took place at the State House. I find this spectacle offensive. People are struggling to feed their families, keep children in school and pay for treatment, yet the governing party can parade expensive vehicles for its political organisers. The same Nigerians being told to endure hardship are watching those close to power enjoy another round of privileges. Where did the money come from? The exact cost and funding arrangements have not been publicly disclosed. I will therefore not pretend that estimates circulating online are verified accounts, or claim that the vehicles were bought with stolen public money. But Mrs Tinubu should publish the facts. Who purchased them? Who donated them? What did they cost? Who now owns them? If private donors paid, Nigerians should know their identities and whether they have business before this government. A gift channelled through the President’s wife may carry expectations, even when nobody says so publicly. Disclosure would allow the public to examine those relationships instead of being expected to take everything on trust. If public resources were involved, the Presidency must explain the legal authority and public purpose. Party mobilisation is APC business. Any use of government money, staff or facilities to support it deserves scrutiny. There is also a correction we must make to the claim that the First Lady has “no budget”. Her position has no independent constitutional executive mandate, but money has nevertheless been appropriated for it. In 2023, the National Assembly approved ₦1.5 billion for vehicles for her office. That allocation does not explain the funding of these latest vehicles, but it demonstrates why Parliament cannot escape responsibility for the spending surrounding her activities. How much public support does the First Lady’s operation receive across the relevant government accounts? What expenditure is authorised, who approves it, and where can Nigerians examine the results? These are reasonable questions about public money. Neither a charitable initiative nor the prestige of the presidential household should place anyone beyond them. My deeper concern is the influence of the Tinubu family within Aso Rock. I suspect Mrs Tinubu and her stepson, Seyi Tinubu, wield more power than their publicly stated roles would justify. I cannot prove that they jointly run the government. But I want to know whether ministers and officials receive instructions from family members, and whether access to the President is being used to exercise authority without responsibility. I remain concerned about the President’s health. I cannot establish a diagnosis from public appearances, nor prove that illness has made his wife the effective head of government. My fear is that uncertainty about his capacity may create room for unelected relatives to exercise greater influence. That concern should be answered through openness about how decisions are made. If a President becomes unable to discharge his duties, the Constitution provides a process. His wife does not become President. His son does not acquire a share of the office. I consider this blurring of family influence, government prestige and party campaigning unacceptable. Mrs Tinubu has every right to support her husband and campaign for the APC. She should also expect searching questions when she uses the standing of First Lady to do so. The National Assembly should demand the relevant accounts and scrutinise any public expenditure. The Presidency should explain her diplomatic mandate. The APC should disclose how these campaign vehicles were financed. Nigeria has capable diplomats, public servants and constitutional officeholders. They must be allowed to do their jobs through institutions whose decisions can be questioned and whose spending can be examined. I want a country governed openly, where an official’s authority comes from law and where the President’s family is subject to the same scrutiny as everyone else. Aso Rock belongs to Nigerians. The Tinubu family are temporary occupants, and they should never be allowed to forget it. #LettersFromStockholm #Nigeria #Accountability #Transparency #RuleOfLaw

2027: OUR ANGER MUST REACH THE BALLOT BOX By Kio Amachree Letters from Stockholm I do not write about Nigeria’s failures simply to collect likes, shares and sympathetic comments. My articles will have failed in their purpose if they produce applause while nothing changes on the ground. As 2027 approaches, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: social media opposition can create an illusion of political strength unless it translates into organisation, voter participation and sustained public accountability. An administration does not lose power because its critics win arguments online. The lessons of 2023 deserve serious attention. Millions of Nigerians participated in that election with hope and determination. Their commitment should never be dismissed. But the European Union’s observation mission identified weaknesses in electoral administration that damaged trust in INEC, and called for greater transparency, accessible results and action against impunity for electoral offences. Those concerns demand practical answers before another election. (eeas.europa.eu⁠) The work must therefore reach communities, wards and polling units. Opposition parties need credible local organisation, properly trained polling agents and the capacity to document irregularities. Citizens need reliable information about participating and reporting intimidation. Civil society needs the resources and independence to scrutinise the process from beginning to end. Online enthusiasm must support that work. It cannot replace it. INEC should be left in no doubt about the standard Nigerians expect: an election whose procedures are transparent, whose results can be scrutinised and whose officials are answerable for misconduct. Any attempt to intimidate voters, falsify results or obstruct scrutiny must meet organised, peaceful resistance through documented evidence, legal challenges and sustained nonviolent protest. That is what I mean by people power: citizens exercising their democratic rights with discipline, courage and persistence. Aso Rock must also understand that criticism cannot be wished away by surrounding the president with loyalists who tell him only what he wants to hear. Presidential applause is a poor measure of public consent. I want Bola Tinubu to leave office peacefully through democratic defeat. I believe many Nigerians share that wish. The proper test is a credible election in which every citizen can participate freely and every valid vote counts. If the electorate rejects him, he must accept that verdict and leave. But replacing a president will not, by itself, end corruption. I want credible allegations of embezzlement investigated independently. I want those responsible prosecuted and, where convicted after fair trials, jailed in accordance with the law. I want stolen assets recovered and returned to public use. Political influence, family connections and party membership must provide no shelter from accountability. Every naira stolen from the public represents something denied to somebody else: treatment, education, security, infrastructure or the chance of a decent life. We cannot continue treating the theft of public money as an ordinary privilege of political success. I also want transparency about any undisclosed relationships between Nigeria’s leaders and foreign intelligence agencies, including the CIA in Langley, Virginia. On Tinubu specifically, suspicion must be tested against evidence. The April 2025 US court ruling upheld the CIA’s refusal to confirm or deny whether responsive records existed; it did not establish that Tinubu works for, or is controlled by, the agency. That distinction matters. My demand is for verifiable answers about any relationship that could compromise Nigeria’s sovereignty. (law.justia.com⁠) Our credibility as critics depends on applying the same standards of evidence that we demand from those in power. There must also be serious reform of the judiciary and security services. Nigeria needs transparent judicial appointments, institutional independence, timely justice and credible investigation of judicial misconduct. Citizens must be able to challenge powerful officials without believing that the outcome has already been purchased. The security services must protect the public and the electoral process. Officers who intimidate voters, abuse detainees or act as political enforcers must face independent investigation and consequences where wrongdoing is established. No public institution should become hired muscle for a president, his family, his associates or his party. And any opposition seeking our votes must explain how it will prevent these abuses under its own administration. We should demand open procurement, effective audits, protection for whistleblowers, independent investigations and public reporting on recovered assets. A promise to fight corruption means little without institutions capable of exposing and punishing it. Nigeria should lead Africa through the strength of its democracy, the quality of its institutions and the dignity it affords its people. I fear that four more years of Tinubu’s leadership would deepen the damage and make recovery harder. I will continue to write because silence would betray my convictions. But writing must help produce action. Let us organise, vote, document wrongdoing and insist peacefully on an honest count. Let us remain engaged after the election, whoever wins. Nigeria deserves citizens whose determination lasts longer than the news cycle. #Nigeria2027 #ElectoralIntegrity #Accountability #PeoplePower #LettersFromStockholm

Letters from Stockholm The Elderly Abuse of Bola Tinubu By Kio Amachree There is a word for what is being done to the President of Nigeria, and it is not a political word. It is a word social workers use. It is elderly abuse. Elderly abuse does not only mean hitting an old man or stealing his pension. The textbooks define it to include exploitation: using a frail person's name, authority and assets for the benefit of those around him, while he is no longer fully able to protect himself or to say no. Nigeria is watching a case study unfold on live television, and the victim is sitting in Aso Rock. Every Nigerian with eyes can see what the Presidency insists we cannot. The President is very old. He is unsteady on his feet. His hands tremble in public. His speech wanders. He has stumbled on state occasions, at home and abroad, in front of cameras that cannot be bribed. He has just come back from four weeks in London and Paris, a trip his handlers called a working vacation, from which his return was rescheduled at least twice while the opposition asked where he was and whether he was well. He missed the United Nations General Assembly. He has visited France more often than most Nigerians have visited their own villages, on trips described variously as private, working, and official, and the one place his spokesmen swear he never goes is a hospital. I do not believe them. More importantly, Nigerians do not believe them. Let us be honest about his age. The official record says 1952. Nobody in Lagos who was an adult in the 1960s believes it. Bola Tinubu was my late mother's contemporary. That generation has largely gone. The man we are watching is, by the reckoning of people who knew him before he reinvented himself, well past eighty and quite possibly closer to ninety. A country of two hundred and fifty million people is being run, on paper, by a man whose true date of birth is a state secret. Then there is his health. The rumours are relentless, and they are not all idle. There have been persistent reports of serious illness, including cancer, requiring treatment that Nigeria's own hospitals either cannot provide or are not trusted to provide. The Presidency calls every such report politically motivated. Fine. Then publish his medical records. Every serious democracy expects it. The refusal is the answer. Now to the abusers. I watched, from a distance, what Jill Biden did to her husband. She knew. Everyone around him knew. And she kept a sick, visibly declining old man in a presidential race because the power attached to him was too sweet to surrender. The world called it loyalty. It was not loyalty. It was exploitation, and the whole Democratic Party was complicit until a single debate made the lie impossible. Remi Tinubu is no better. I suspect, and I am entitled to suspect because the evidence is on our screens, that the First Lady is running a substantial part of this government from behind closed doors, in her husband's name, with his signature and without his full capacity. A senator by profession, a politician by temperament, she has every motive to keep him in the chair and none to let him go home and rest. That is not devotion. That is a woman using a frail man as a rubber stamp. And then there is Seyi Tinubu. Here, there and everywhere. In Kano, in Kaduna, in Lagos, in London. Receiving governors. Dispensing favours. Convening youth groups. Flexing political muscle on a scale that no private citizen in Nigerian history has ever been permitted. He holds no office. He was elected by nobody. He is accountable to nobody. He is, in every practical sense, a de facto prime minister, and his only qualification is that his father is too weak to stop him. A son who loved his father would be fighting to get him out of that building. This one is fighting to keep him in it, because the day the old man leaves, Seyi's power evaporates. This is the Paul Biya model. Cameroon has spent years governed by an absent, ailing old man whose family and courtiers rule in his name while the country rots. Nigeria cannot afford a Biya. Not with our international reputation already in the gutter. Not with the American courts having forced into the open the 1993 Chicago forfeiture in which the President surrendered nearly half a million dollars the United States government linked to heroin trafficking. Not with corruption on a scale that would embarrass Abacha. Not with bandits and kidnappers running whole states. Running Nigeria requires a sound mind and a fit body. It is not a part-time job for a convalescent. It is not a family business. And it is not a throne for a man to be propped up on by a wife and a son who have discovered that a weak president is far more useful to them than a strong one. The Constitution has a remedy. Section 144 allows the cabinet to declare a president incapable. It will never be used, because every minister knows who put him there and who will take him out. So the remedy must come from Nigerians themselves, loudly and relentlessly, until the question cannot be avoided: who is actually governing Nigeria, and by what right? Let the old man go home. If his family loved him, they would have taken him there already. Kio Amachree Worldview International, Stockholm

THE NIGERIAN WHO SAT AT U THANT'S TABLE: HOW MY FATHER BECAME THE FIRST AFRICAN UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS By Kio Amachree In November 1961 the United Nations was an organisation in shock. Dag Hammarskjöld had been killed in an air crash two months earlier on his way to negotiate a ceasefire in Katanga. The Soviet Union had spent a year demanding that the office of Secretary-General be split three ways, one head for each bloc. The compromise that saved the office put a quiet Burmese diplomat, U Thant, in the chair as Acting Secretary-General, and left him to prove that one man could run the organisation and keep the Congo from collapsing at the same time. To do that he needed a Secretariat that looked like the world it served. Seventeen African states had joined the UN in 1960 alone. Not one African sat in its senior ranks. That was the vacancy my father filled. THE RECOMMENDATION FROM LAGOS The appointment did not fall from the sky. Nigeria, one year independent and already the largest African voice in the General Assembly, pressed the case. Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa backed the nomination of Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC, then Solicitor-General of the Federation, and Jaja Wachuku, Nigeria's first Permanent Representative to the United Nations and its first Foreign Minister, carried the case through the corridors in New York. Wachuku's biographers record it as one of his achievements: he secured the appointment of the first African Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, and the man was Nigeria's Amachree. U Thant accepted the recommendation. In early 1962 my father resigned from the Nigerian civil service and took up his post at the Secretariat. The UN's biographical note on him, BIO/140, was issued in February of that year. The rank was then styled Under-Secretary; the office has since been renamed Under-Secretary-General, which is why he is remembered under both titles. He was the first African from the continent to hold it. TWO PORTFOLIOS, ONE DESK He was given two responsibilities at once, and either would have been a full job. The first was Trusteeship and Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories. The Trusteeship Council still had territories under its charge, and every colonial power was obliged under the Charter to report to the General Assembly on the territories it had not yet freed. All of that paper, the reporting, the petitions, the visiting missions, came through my father's department. The UN photo archive from May 1964 shows him in London with the Sub-Committee on Southern Rhodesia, the file that would later become one of the longest-running decolonisation disputes of the century. A Nigerian lawyer who had been born a colonial subject now sat at the desk that processed the retreat of empire. The family has never lost sight of that symmetry. The second portfolio was the emergency: Under-Secretary in Charge of Congo Civilian Operations. THE CONGO FILE The world remembers the blue helmets of ONUC. It has largely forgotten the civilian operation that ran alongside them. When the Belgians left in 1960 they took with them almost everyone who knew how to run a hospital, a customs post, a treasury, an airfield or a telephone exchange. The UN's job was to stop a country the size of Western Europe from ceasing to function, and that job was civilian. The UN archives list my father as the headquarters official in charge of that effort. Reporting to him from Leopoldville were the Officer-in-Charge of ONUC, Robert Gardiner of Ghana from January 1962 to May 1963, and the Chief of Civilian Operations in the field. Beneath them the specialised agencies each ran a mission inside the Congo: the World Health Organization for medicine, UNESCO for schools, the FAO for food, ICAO for airfields and air traffic control, the ITU, the Universal Postal Union, the ILO and the World Meteorological Organization. The International Monetary Fund worked on unifying the Congolese currency. The subject files that survive in the archives under his name cover public health, relief, the Congo Fund, airlifts, the training of judges, the economics and finances of the country, and eventually the withdrawal of the mission. The purpose of all of it was to make the UN redundant. Every expert was there to leave behind a Congolese who could do the work. Fellow Nigerians served in that effort; Francis Nwokedi, Nigeria's first Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, was seconded to reorganise the Congolese civil service. WHY IT MATTERS NOW Nigeria in 1962 had the confidence to put forward one of its best men for one of the hardest jobs on earth, and the world accepted him. Balewa recommended, Wachuku negotiated, U Thant appointed, and a Kalabari lawyer from Buguma spent four years holding the Congo's civil administration together while supervising the paperwork of decolonisation for a continent. He left the Secretariat in 1966. The exchange of letters between him and U Thant on his departure is still catalogued in the UN Digital Library. The Congo file still carries his name. The man who kept a country standing is remembered, if at all, in footnotes. This is the story I am writing to change that. Sources: - [Jaja Wachuku – Wikipedia](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaja_W…) - [UN Archives: United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC) 1960–1964](search.archives.un.org/downl…) - [UN Archives: Office for Special Political Affairs 1955–1991](search.archives.un.org/downl…) - [UN Digital Library: Letters exchanged between U Thant and Godfrey K. J. Amachree](digitallibrary.un.org/record…) - [Robert K. A. Gardiner – Wikipedia](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert…) - [Selection and Appointment of U Thant – UN](un.org/sg/en/content/selecti…) - [Auburn Plainsman, February 1966](content.lib.auburn.edu/digit…)

ARE NIGERIANS REALLY HAPPY WITH THE CHOICES BEFORE THEM IN 2027? By Kio Amachree Letters from Stockholm I have been asking myself a question that I believe millions of Nigerians should be asking as we approach the 2027 presidential election. Are we genuinely satisfied with the people presenting themselves as our future leaders, or are we simply being asked to choose between the same familiar political faces? Nigeria is a country of over 200 million people, blessed with extraordinary talent, intelligence, education and experience. Yet whenever a presidential election approaches, we seem to return to the same small circle of politicians, many of whom have dominated our political landscape for decades. Surely, Nigeria can produce more choices than this. Recent opinion surveys reveal something interesting. According to Yiaga Africa’s October 2026 findings, 49% of respondents were motivated by a desire for leadership change, while only 16% cited particular candidates as their motivation. A substantial proportion of prospective voters had not even settled on whom they wanted to support. That should tell our political establishment something. Nigerians are not necessarily enthusiastic about the choices being offered to them. Many want change, but wanting change and believing in those promising to deliver it are two very different things. We have Bola Tinubu, the incumbent president, whose administration has faced widespread criticism over the cost of living, insecurity and economic hardship. Then we have Atiku Abubakar, who has been pursuing the presidency for decades, and Peter Obi, who continues to command considerable support, particularly among Nigerians seeking a different political direction. But I ask a simple question: Are these really the only people Nigeria can produce? Where are the accomplished Nigerians who have built successful institutions, managed complex organisations, demonstrated integrity in public service and shown that leadership can be about something other than acquiring political power? Why must presidential ambition in Nigeria appear to be the preserve of established political networks, wealthy financiers and individuals who have spent much of their adult lives moving from one political party to another? I am not suggesting that experience should count for nothing. Quite the opposite. But experience must be accompanied by achievement, accountability, character and a genuine understanding of the responsibilities of leadership. I also believe Nigerians must stop confusing popularity with competence. A politician attracting enormous crowds, commanding millions of social media followers or delivering entertaining speeches is not necessarily equipped to govern one of Africa’s most complicated countries. We have made that mistake too often. The tragedy is that our political system makes it extraordinarily difficult for credible newcomers to emerge. Party structures, nomination processes, campaign financing and political patronage all favour those already inside the system. And so the same names return, election after election, while millions of Nigerians are left wondering whether anything will ever change. I would genuinely like to hear from Nigerians across the country, regardless of ethnicity, religion or political affiliation. Are you satisfied with the presidential choices emerging for 2027? Do you believe Tinubu, Atiku, Obi or any of the other familiar political figures represent the leadership Nigeria needs? Or do you believe this country deserves an entirely new generation of candidates? I am particularly interested in hearing from those who support none of them. Because one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: dissatisfaction with the government does not automatically translate into confidence in the opposition. Nigeria does not lack capable people. What we must examine is why our political system so rarely gives them the opportunity to lead. Perhaps the most important question for 2027 is not simply who should replace whom, but why Nigerians are repeatedly presented with such a limited choice of people seeking the highest office in the land. I would like to hear your views. Kio Amachree Letters from Stockholm #LettersFromStockholm #KioAmachree #Nigeria2027 #NigeriaDecides2027 #NigerianPolitics #LeadershipMatters #GoodGovernance #PoliticalReform #Democracy #Accountability #NigeriaDeservesBetter #FutureOfNigeria