TD American humanitarian worker, Mr. Mike Arnold, has alleged that former United States president, Barack Obama, American political consultant, and former chief strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns, David Axelrod, Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and Pope Leo XIV (formerly Robert Prevost) share early 1980s Chicago South Side connections and collectively contributed to Nigeria’s mess.
Mr. Arnold claims that Obama limited military aid to Nigeria under the Leahy Law during Boko Haram’s rise, while Axelrod’s firm helped elect Muhammadu Buhari in 2015/.
As a filmmaker, author, and frequent visitor to Nigeria’s conflict zones through Africa Arise International, Arnold frames these ties as a non-coincidental network that left Nigeria in ruins.
Former President, Barack Obama, American political consultant, David Axelrod, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and Pope Leo XIV (formerly Robert Prevost)
Read the article titled “The South Side Boys Who Broke Nigeria” in full below:
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The Bomb
“Four South Side boys. Early ’80s Chicago. Small enough geographic footprint that their paths almost had to cross in the same gritty neighborhoods, campuses, and parishes.
Today those same four have left Nigeria a smoking wreck.
Barack Obama.
David Axelrod.
Bola Tinubu (or whatever his real name is).
And the brand-new American Pope, Leo XIV.
They weren’t just in the same city. They were in the same South Side orbit when the future was still up for grabs.
Tinubu supposedly collected degrees at Richard J. Daley College and Chicago State University on the South Side, graduating in ’79.
The university has rubber-stamped that he attended and walked with a business admin degree.
But the records are a mess—gender marked “F” on key transcripts, birth-year mismatches, claims about schools that didn’t even exist yet, and a long trail of identity questions that never die.
If that’s even his real name, the paperwork still smells.
Prevost (now Pope Leo XIV) was pure far-South Side and south-suburb stock—Dolton, Riverdale parish, then Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park, ordained in ’82.
Axelrod was already living and working the Hyde Park beat as a young Tribune political gun. Obama dropped into the far South Side as a community organizer just a couple years later in ’85.
Same stretch of Chicago. Same era. Same ambitious young men who would later put their hands all over Nigeria’s throat.
The author, Mike Arnold
Here’s how the damage was done
Obama’s White House restricted and blocked key military hardware and support to Nigeria under the Leahy Law while Boko Haram was exploding.
Helicopters, aircraft, real firepower—delayed or denied.
Critics, including former President Jonathan, said it left Nigerian forces fighting with one hand tied. Effectively unleashed the monsters.
Then, when the time came, Obama rolled out the red carpet and threw full U.S. weight behind Muhammadu Buhari.
Axelrod’s old firm AKPD was on the payroll helping engineer that same Buhari victory in 2015—the Chicago machine exporting its playbook straight into Abuja.
Tinubu has never been shy about the credit. He has said it out loud, multiple times: he was the man who put Buhari on the throne.
“If not for me… Buhari would not have been president.”
He claims he went to Katsina, talked the general into running again, built the coalition, and delivered the win.
The kingmaker who later took the crown himself!
And the Pope? Fellow Chicago boy. Axelrod got a private, closed-door audience with Leo XIV on April 9.
Days later the Holy Father was publicly pushing the line that there’s no Christian genocide in Nigeria—violence hits Christians and Muslims, it’s terrorism plus economics and land, not a one-sided slaughter.
The same soft language that lets the killers keep killing while the world looks away.
Obama pulled the support and blessed Buhari.
Axelrod ran the playbook.
Tinubu claims he installed the man.
The Pope, after a quiet sit-down with Axelrod, told the world the bloodbath isn’t what it looks like.
Four boys from the same small patch of South Side Chicago.
Former Editor of Elombah.com (https://elombah.com), former Editor-in-Chief of News Band (https://news.band), former GM/COO of Diaspora Digital Media [DDM] (https://diasporadigitalmedia.com), MD of This Dawn News.
