TD Dear Mr Secretary, Marco Rubio,
I write to you from Stockholm, as a Nigerian by blood and a Swedish citizen by choice, and as someone who has spent a lifetime as part and parcel of the relationship between the United States and Nigeria.
I was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. I built a career on Wall Street and in corporate America.
My father, Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC, was Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General and the first African to serve as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, working alongside Americans in New York at the height of the Congo crisis.
I did my National Service inside the National Assembly and the Presidency of the Shagari administration.
I have been around power since I could walk. I say this not to boast but so that you understand I am not writing as a stranger to how these things are done.
It is obvious to millions of Nigerians that the United States has made President Bola Ahmed Tinubu its asset.
That is my firm conviction, and I am far from alone in holding it.
We have seen this film before.
Manuel Noriega. Saddam Hussein.
Osama bin Laden. Samuel Doe. Mobutu Sese Seko. The Shah of Iran. In every case Washington told itself that a compromised man was a useful man, right up until the day he was not, and it was ordinary people who paid the bill.
This is 2026. Information moves in seconds, not decades, and Nigerians are educated enough to read the record for themselves. Mind games that worked in 1976 do not work today.
Let me put the record plainly, because it does not take a rocket scientist to work out what is in the files.
In 1993 the United States government seized funds in bank accounts in Chicago connected to Mr Tinubu as part of a federal investigation into a heroin trafficking network.
Mr Tinubu did not contest the matter to trial. He forfeited $460,000 to the United States Treasury in Case No. 93 C 4483.
That is not a rumour. It is the judgment of a United States District Court.
On 28 August 2026, in Greenspan v. FBI and DEA before Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, the FBI filed a sworn declaration confirming that such an investigation existed.
On the very same day the sitting President of Nigeria filed a sixteen-page opposition asking an American court to keep those files sealed.
A man with nothing to hide does not spend the prestige of his office fighting to keep American records about himself from the people he governs.
Add to that the questions that have followed him for thirty years and have never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction: the family name he carries, the age he claims, the education he asserts.
Whatever the truth, these are allegations that any serious nation would want resolved before it hands a man the keys to its treasury, its army and its security services.
Nigeria was never given that chance. And what has Nigeria received for it?
An economy in a nosedive, a currency that has collapsed, inflation that has hollowed out the middle class, and security that is, to put it politely, non-existent across huge parts of the country.
Critics of the President and his family end up in DSS custody.
The opposition is being squeezed ahead of 2027. This is the trajectory of a dictatorship, and Nigeria will not accept it.
So, I ask you directly, Mr Secretary: Why would President Trump and yourself want an asset who has already been exposed, and whose exposure is tied to white heroin?
I ask because I know your record, and your record is precisely why this matters. You are the son of Cuban exiles.
You have spent your entire public life confronting the leadership in Havana.
You have told the world, again and again, that the Cuban regime and its ally in Caracas are complicit in the poisoning of American streets with narcotics.
You have treated the Castro succession and the Maduro government as criminal enterprises dressed up as states, and on that basis you have sanctioned them, isolated them and, in Venezuela’s case, watched the United States use force against a sitting head of state on the stated grounds of drug trafficking.
On a single day this August you sanctioned Cuban regime networks and a cocaine smuggling ring in the same breath.
The President you serve hates drugs. He does not drink. He has said so himself many times.
I do not quarrel with any of that. I quarrel with the exception.
You cannot hold Havana and Caracas to a standard of zero tolerance on narcotics and then extend the red carpet to Abuja, where the head of state’s name sits in a heroin forfeiture judgment in Chicago and whose lawyers are, at this very moment, fighting your own Justice Department’s records in a federal court.
That is not principle. That is a principle with a Nigeria-shaped hole in it, and 230 million Nigerians can see the hole.
To the wider world it is beginning to look like one big hypocrisy.
I grew up around power, and I have never seen a situation in which the United States would jeopardise its relationship with a country of 230 million people, the largest population in Africa, with oil, gas, minerals, a vast diaspora and a strategic position on the Gulf of Guinea, over one old man with a very dodgy background.
No single individual is worth that. Nigeria is a partner. Mr Tinubu is a liability.
I therefore ask you, on behalf of the people of Nigeria, to do two things.
First, use the weight of your office to have the files held by the FBI, the DEA and the CIA on President Tinubu released, with whatever lawful redactions are necessary to protect genuine national security.
Judge Howell has already ruled that the public interest is real.
Nigerians deserve to know who their President is and how compromised he may be.
If America could release the Epstein files, it can release these. Apply to Abuja the same standard you apply to Havana.
Second, I beg you not to ruin the good relationship between the United States and Nigeria, a relationship I have been part of for decades, by tying it to a man who cannot survive daylight.
Stand with the Nigerian people, not with one individual.
When he goes, and he will go, Nigerians will remember which side America chose.
I remain at your disposal, and at the disposal of anyone in the State Department who wishes to discuss this further.
Yours faithfully,
Kio Amachree, Founder and President, Worldview International Stockholm
