“Gangsters are ruling Nigeria — criminals of the highest order, I don’t see the present opposition beating Bola Tinubu. He is organized; they are split. Peter Obi ran again for 2027, but the opposition has since fractured further — Atiku Abubakar and Kwankwaso went their own ways rather than uniting behind one candidate”
I am beginning to wish I were a politician running for office in Nigeria, because the rot has gone so deep it will take every Nigerian, working together, to rid the country of the vermin who have dragged us into the cesspool of all cesspools.
I could beat Bola Tinubu in a head-to-head contest if I had the backing these other men have. I would finish him in one hour. All his dirt is already on the table in front of the whole country — it is no longer a hidden secret that Bola Tinubu is as shady as shady gets.
I would sit down with my rich, powerful fraternity brothers in the Republican Party, go and see Donald Trump, and tell him face to face: it’s time to get rid of this particular asset. He’s well past his sell-by date, useless to the United States, exposed, and totally incompetent. And I promise you, they would listen to me. Why wouldn’t they? We all belong to the same secret club, where secret handshakes and oaths of lifelong secrecy are made between equals — and to this day, I am still the only Black member.
I have electricity. I have healthcare. My children are well educated at functioning schools. The streets are safe, the economy is sound, and there is a future in the country I am also a citizen of. So the problems I write about in Nigeria do not affect me directly — they affect those of you reading my articles in Nigeria, without electricity, without the money to eat three square meals a day, and with the fear of being kidnapped on a Nigerian highway — that is, if the highway doesn’t kill you first.
I don’t know whether my articles, my research, and my words are even read in Nigeria. I am eight thousand miles away, and social media is not the most important thing in Nigeria. All I know is that I am being instructed by some higher power to do what I do, and to keep doing it until I see a change for the better.
Gangsters are ruling Nigeria — criminals of the highest order, men who will kill you for exposing their wickedness. And I say to these men: I will hurt you where it really matters — your foreign bank accounts, your offshore palaces, and the children you send to elite schools abroad. I will get my powerful Old Etonian friends to make your lives in England a misery, the way Isabel dos Santos found out. UK authorities froze roughly £580 million of her assets and later imposed sanctions and a travel ban on her, over allegations she siphoned hundreds of millions from Angola’s state coffers — a woman who was educated in England, whose children live in England, now hiding in Dubai for fear of an Interpol red notice.
All my professional life, criminals have thwarted my path in Nigeria — the path my father raised me to take — and forced me to find my bread and butter abroad. I first met them serving my National Service in the National Assembly and the Presidency under Shagari. Every day, up front, I met the most powerful men in Nigeria and watched how they looted and destroyed the oil boom overnight. And here I am, forty years later, watching the same damn thing happen again.
It is not good enough. It has to end.
I don’t see the present opposition beating Bola Tinubu. He is organized; they are split. Peter Obi ran again for 2027, but the opposition has since fractured further — Atiku Abubakar and Kwankwaso went their own ways rather than uniting behind one candidate, and by most accounts that split has only widened Tinubu’s path back to power. Obi remains, in my view, the one figure not tainted by the failures of big government.
The question is whether Nigerians who are presently drunk on tribalism will put that tribalism aside and vote en masse for an Igbo man. I hope they do, because it is time for an Igbo president, and Obi was robbed in 2023.
I cannot vote. I do not live in Nigeria. I can only shout from the sidelines. I pray that those of you who can vote use that vote wisely, and I hope the opposition gets its act together — because if they fail, option two is not going to be nice.
We need new blood: men who can actually read and understand a spreadsheet, who worked for their money, and who don’t bring the baggage of looting and stealing into another Nigerian government
