AN OPEN LETTER TO SEYI TINUBU, BY KIO AMACHREE

Now let me say what must be said to you, and to your father, clearly. Nigeria is not Uganda. Nigeria is not Haiti. What Museveni has built for his son — a dynastic handover dressed in military boots — will not happen here. What the Duvaliers did to Haiti will not happen here. The Nigerian people are awake.

Seyi Tinubu. Let me speak plainly.

I have studied you. I have researched you. I have watched you. And what I have found is not impressive. It is damning.

You are not elected. You hold no public office. You have no constitutional mandate, no democratic authority, no popular legitimacy of any kind. Yet you parade around the Federal Republic of Nigeria like you are the number two man in the country. You convene movements.

You appoint regional directors. You distribute rice to motorists stuck in traffic — rice, Seyi — as if the people of Nigeria, one of the wealthiest nations on earth in natural resources, exist to be fed scraps from the back of a truck by a man who was never voted into anything. The people you are attempting to buy with bags of rice are not beggars. They are citizens. They deserve governance, not theatre.

Let me tell you what I know.

You are the main shareholder of Aranda Overseas Corp., a British Virgin Islands-registered offshore shell company. In October 2017, through that company, you paid £9 million to Deutsche Bank for a mansion at 32 Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood, London. That property had been targeted for confiscation by the Buhari government as part of a petrodollar fraud investigation. It was previously owned by Kolawole Aluko, an international fugitive sought by law enforcement in both Nigeria and the United States in connection with a $1.6 billion oil fraud scheme involving former Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke.  At the very moment your company bought that house, Nigeria’s government was seeking the arrest of its former owner for owing the country a debt worth more than $1.5 billion in stolen oil revenues.

You bought a fraud-tainted mansion, through a BVI shell company, while a federal forfeiture order was still in force. And you said nothing. Your father said nothing. No comment to Bloomberg. No comment to Premium Times. No comment to Channels Television. Silence. Because there is nothing you can say.

You operate in what one publication called the space between formal office and real influence — a lacuna where access, proximity, and trust substitute for democratic accountability.  That is not governance. That is a shadow operation. And shadows do not govern republics.

Your City Boy Movement has been described as dehumanising — distributing food to people trapped in traffic, Nigerians scrambling for sewing machines and freezers at chaotic events, palliatives repackaged as political loyalty-buying ahead of 2027.  Even former Vice President Atiku Abubakar — a man I have challenged myself — was moved to state publicly that your Ramadan food distribution in 2025 was merely experimental, a precursor to what has now become an entrenched strategy of politicising hunger.  He is right about that, at least.

Nigerians are not beggars. And they are not your voters to purchase with bags of rice.

A song was written about you, Seyi. It was called Tell Your Papa. The National Broadcasting Commission banned it for allegedly violating broadcasting regulations.  That is how you respond to criticism in this country — not with accountability, but with suppression.

Now. A personal word.

You have taken up polo. You move in certain international circles. You imagine that the world your father’s money and influence has opened to you is a world you have earned. I want to disabuse you of that notion directly.

I attended Eton College. Your polo coach was in the same house as me there. That world — the world of Eton, of serious institutions, of genuine inherited tradition and earned distinction — is not a costume you can purchase. It does not transfer through association or through acquiring a polo mallet. The people in that world can see the difference. I can certainly see it.

Now let me say what must be said to you, and to your father, clearly.

Nigeria is not Uganda. Nigeria is not Haiti. What Museveni has built for his son — a dynastic handover dressed in military boots — will not happen here. What the Duvaliers did to Haiti will not happen here. The Nigerian people are awake.

The diaspora is watching. The international institutions are receiving our submissions. The FBI/DEA files are coming. The UK Serious Fraud Office is in receipt of formal documentation. INTERPOL has been notified. The walls are closing, not opening.

You are the adopted son of a man whose own legal history — a $460,000 drug-proceeds forfeiture in Chicago, a DEA file that the U.S. courts have ordered released — is now a matter of active international legal proceedings. You have built your position on that foundation. That foundation is cracking.

Pack your bags. Or better: open your books. Explain the BVI company. Explain the St. John’s Wood mansion. Explain the source of the funds. Explain the City Boy Movement’s financing. Come before the Nigerian people — not with trucks of rice — but with answers.

Because I am not finished. And Nigeria is watching.

Kio Amachree | Stockholm, Sweden | President, Worldview International Can be reached via his X: Kio Amachree @Ivory1957

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed in this article are entirely those of the author and not of The DEFENDER Newspaper Nigeria.