Open Letter to President Trump: Release Tinubu’s Files – By Kio Amachree

Open Letter to President Trump: Release Tinubu’s Files – By Kio Amachree

I write to you not as a stranger, but as a longstanding friend of the United States, a fellow alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania, and a former tenant of Trump Plaza.

I write also as the founder of Worldview International, a platform dedicated to accountability and good governance in Nigeria and across Africa.

I ask you, as one who has done business in your buildings and studied under the same Franklin Field skies, to finally release the files that answer a question 230 million Nigerians can no longer avoid: who is Bola Ahmed Tinubu?

Nigeria and the United States have been partners since October 1, 1960, the day Nigeria’s flag first rose over Lagos.

That partnership has been real and mutually rewarding. In 2024, two-way goods and services trade between our countries reached roughly $13 billion, with U.S. goods exports to Nigeria climbing sharply in 2025 and the United States running a services trade surplus with Nigeria of $1.7 billion.

America remains the largest foreign direct investor in Nigeria.

This is not charity. It is commerce that has served American exporters, American energy companies, and American workers for more than sixty years.

Nigeria has also given America something no trade statistic can capture: its people. Roughly three-quarters of a million Americans now claim Nigerian ancestry.

They are, by every independent measure, among the most educated immigrant communities in this country. Migration Policy Institute data show 61 percent of Nigerian immigrants hold at least a bachelor’s degree, against 31 percent of the foreign-born population generally.

Nigerian-Americans hold graduate degrees at nearly three times the national rate. They are your doctors, your surgeons, your engineers, your law partners, your professors.

This is the Nigeria that has quietly strengthened America for two generations, one degree, one hospital shift, one courtroom at a time.

It is against that record of achievement that the government now ruling Nigeria looks so shabby.

Mr. President, you do not drink, and you do not smoke. I do not believe a man of your discipline can, in good conscience, continue shielding the man Nigeria calls its President.

On October 4, 1993, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ordered $460,000 held in Bola Tinubu’s account at First Heritage Bank forfeited to the United States government.

The verified complaint, sworn to by Special Agent Kevin Moss of the IRS, tied that money to a white heroin trafficking network run out of Chicago by Adegboyega Mueez Akande and Abiodun Agbele.

Mobil Oil, Tinubu’s declared employer at the time, told federal investigators he had no authority to move funds of that scale through personal accounts.

No criminal charge was filed, and Tinubu admitted no wrongdoing under the settlement, and I say this to you plainly rather than pretend the record says more than it does.

But the underlying finding, that specific funds under his control were adjudged proceeds of narcotics trafficking, is not rumor. It is a federal court order that has sat on the public record for over thirty years.

That is precisely why the case will not die.

Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has now ordered the FBI and DEA to search for and process records responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests on this very matter, rejecting the agencies’ bid to keep the files sealed indefinitely.

Your own Department of Justice has begun turning over records to congressional offices.

Nigerians have also spent years raising, without final resolution, pointed questions about Tinubu’s claimed secondary schooling, a university transcript that reportedly lists a different name, gender, and birth year than he uses publicly, and a claimed employment history at Deloitte that the firm says it has no record of.

I state these as the disputed and still-unresolved allegations that they are, not as proven fact.

But thirty years is long enough for the world’s most powerful government to decide, one way or another, whether the man leading Africa’s largest democracy is who he says he is.

Meanwhile, Nigerians are dying in the vacuum this uncertainty leaves behind. Schoolgirls have been marched out of their dormitories in Kebbi State.

Pupils have been seized from their classrooms in Oyo.

Hundreds were dragged into the forests of Kwara and Niger States this year alone before soldiers finally reached them.

Each time, the President’s office issues a statement praising itself for the rescue, while the deeper question goes unasked: why were illegal mining camps and banditry networks across the north allowed to metastasize into the kidnapping economy terrorizing ordinary Nigerian families in the first place, and whom, precisely, is the silence around those mining interests protecting?

A Commander-in-Chief who visits grief for photographs but leaves the criminal networks behind it untouched is not securing his country. He is managing its decline.

I am asking you, Mr. President, as a friend of the United States for the third time: release the Tinubu files.

Let the FBI and DEA records that Judge Howell has ordered disclosed be disclosed in full, without further delay.

The Nigerian people, the most educated diaspora in your own country, deserve to know the truth about the man ruling the land their doctors, lawyers, and engineers still call home.

Respectfully,

Kio Amachree, Founder and President, Worldview International Stockholm, Sweden.

– This Dawn News