TDThere is a question that haunts every honest observer of Nigeria today, one that cuts deeper than policy debates and election petitions. It is not simply how Bola Ahmed Tinubu became president. It is how, with everything we know — everything that is written in black and white in American federal court records — millions of Yoruba Nigerians who have received not a single kobo from the man continue to defend him with a ferocity that borders on the religious.
This is not an article about the governors, the senators, the traditional rulers in borrowed robes who have financially benefited and therefore must perform their loyalty. That calculation is transactional and ultimately cowardly, but at least it has a logic you can trace. This article is about the others. The market trader in Mushin. The university lecturer in Ibadan. The young professional in Ikeja scrolling his phone at midnight, arguing with strangers online about a man who forfeited $460,000 to the United States government in 1993 after his accounts were found to contain proceeds of a heroin trafficking ring operating out of Chicago — and who still cannot tell you, truthfully, when he was born or who he actually is.
What is going on inside the mind of that person?
The answer, when you sit with it honestly, is both understandable and terrifying.
The “It Is Our Turn” Theology
The Yoruba nation has waited. That is the beginning of every conversation. They waited while a Hausa-Fulani elite controlled the federal centre for most of Nigeria’s post-independence history. They watched as MKO Abiola — a Yoruba man who unambiguously won the 1993 presidential election — was robbed, imprisoned, and killed. They absorbed Olusegun Obasanjo, who governed both in uniform and in democratic clothing and who, despite being Yoruba, was never truly seen as a Yoruba president — he was Otta’s man, a son of the military establishment, a figure who spent his tenure dismantling rather than empowering his own region. Obasanjo never commanded this kind of tribal devotion in all his years of power. Nobody prostrated at his feet the way they prostrate before Tinubu.
So when Tinubu finally arrived — whatever his sins, whatever his fabrications, whatever the American courts said — he arrived as the vessel for a accumulated historical grievance. Supporting him became not a political act but an emotional one. A generational one. To criticise him was, in the minds of the faithful, to betray the entire Yoruba nation. To side with the North. To spit on Abiola’s grave.
This is the first thing you must understand. The devotion is not really about Tinubu. It is about what he represents to people who have felt passed over for too long.
The Mythology of the Godfather
The second pillar of the Tinubu cult is the Lagos legend. His supporters genuinely believe — and there is a sliver of truth buried under mountains of mythology — that he transformed Lagos from a broken city into a functioning metropolis. They point to the infrastructure, the internally generated revenue model, the political machine that produced governors and senators. They call him a builder of men. The Jagaban. The leader of warriors.
More than a mere moniker, the title Jagaban crystallised a political identity: part pro-democracy warrior, part pragmatic coalition-builder, and fundamentally, a political survivor who understood that power is never given but must be painstakingly constructed. His loyalists have absorbed this mythology completely. In their telling, he is a self-made colossus who beat the system, survived Abacha’s death squads, and clawed his way to Aso Rock through sheer will and brilliance. The drug money forfeiture, the certificate forgery, the multiple identities and birthdates — all of these are recast in this mythology as the war wounds of a man the system tried and failed to destroy.
When you point to court documents from a Chicago case confirming that Tinubu was linked to bank accounts used to launder money for a heroin ring, and that he agreed to forfeit assets to U.S. authorities in a plea arrangement sidestepping a potential trial on drug trafficking and money laundering charges, the true believer does not flinch. He says: they tried to destroy him, and they failed. In their world, the prosecution is the proof of his greatness.
This is the psychology of the strongman devotee, seen from Lagos to Moscow to Caracas. The crimes become evidence of power, not of shame.
The Tribal Arithmetic
The third force sustaining this loyalty is the most naked: ethnic arithmetic. Primordial voting is evident in every Nigerian election cycle, even as Nigerians prefer to believe they are choosing based on merit. The Yoruba base is not blind to Tinubu’s flaws. Many of them, in private, will concede every point. Yes, he forfeited drug money. Yes, nobody knows his real name or age. Yes, the election was stolen. But — and here is the word that ends every honest conversation — but he is ours.
Yoruba leaders have framed their support explicitly around representation, noting that inclusion strengthens loyalty and promotes stability,  as if loyalty to a drug money launderer is a form of political stability rather than national self-destruction.
The Fantasy That Cannot Be Questioned
And so they live in the fantasy. They post his photograph with captions calling him a visionary. They cite the naira’s partial recovery, conveniently forgetting the collapse that preceded it. They speak of “Renewed Hope” while petrol costs more than most Nigerians earn per hour and children go to sleep hungry across the Southwest that is supposed to be his showpiece. They invoke Quranic verses and Yoruba proverbs to sanctify a man whose forfeiture of funds linked to narcotics trafficking featured prominently at the Presidential Election Petition Court, and whose legitimacy as president rests on an election he did not honestly win.
There is nothing under the sun that says lying and cheating is right. No holy book. No philosophy. No tradition. The Yoruba nation, which produced some of the finest legal, literary, and intellectual minds in Africa, knows this better than anyone.
When the Fantasy Ends
But fantasies do not last forever. And this one is already cracking. Since late 2025, the ADC has absorbed political heavyweights at a pace that has left pundits scrambling for historical analogies, and nowhere is the pressure more acutely felt than in the South-West — simultaneously Tinubu’s greatest strength and his most exposed flank.
When his reign ends — and it will end, because lies and cheating always catch up, gravity is not selective — the faithful will face a reckoning they are wholly unprepared for. The man they called a deity will be revealed as what the court documents always said he was: a drug money launderer who seized a nation, looted its treasury in plain sight, and left a generation to pay the bill.
The tragedy of tribal devotion is not just what it does to the worshippers. It is what it does to the nation that watches them worship and concludes that Nigeria simply cannot be saved.
It can be saved. But not by those who choose a man over a country.
#KioAmachree #WorldviewInternational #TheKioSolution #NigeriaAccountability #Tinubu #JabaganFaithful #NigeriaDecides2027 #DrugMoneyLaunderer #EndTribalism #NigeriaDeservesBetter
Kio Amachree | Stockholm, Sweden | President, Worldview International
