TDÂ Ask yourself a simple question: Who is still defending Bola Ahmed Tinubu?
Not the world. In Washington, London, Paris, Brussels and at the United Nations, his name now travels with a file attached:
- a 1993 Chicago forfeiture of $460,000 in a federal heroin-trafficking investigation,
- an FBI sworn declaration confirming an investigation existed, and,
- a sitting president spending Nigeria’s time and lawyers fighting in a United States courtroom to stop his own records from being released.
That is known in every serious government office on this planet. Diplomats do not say it to his face. They say it to each other.
Not level-headed Nigerians of any tribe. Not the Igbo, not the Ijaw, not the Hausa-Fulani, not the Tiv, not the Edo. And not the great many Yorubas of conscience either: Wole Soyinka has said his piece, Pa Ayo Adebanjo’s Afenifere refused to endorse him in 2023, and countless ordinary Yoruba families in Ibadan, Ilorin, Abeokuta and Lagos have quietly stopped defending him because their own pockets tell them the truth every morning at the market.
So who is left? A shrinking ring of kinsmen, contractors, appointees and paid voices, defending him not because they believe him but because they are him — their fortunes, their positions and their egos are welded to his survival. That is the honest answer, and it should trouble the community they claim to speak for far more than it troubles the rest of us.
Because look at what they are defending.
A man who was too frightened to appear in New York for the UN General Assembly and sent his deputy instead, while claiming to lead Africa’s most populous nation.
A man who fled a public event in Jos within minutes of arriving.
A man who claimed to have worked at Deloitte and studied at the University of Chicago, and whose own documents showed neither was true.
A man who submitted to INEC a Chicago State University certificate that the university itself could not stand behind, in litigation where records released under a federal judge’s order showed a student file that did not match the man — including entries indicating a female applicant and a different identity.
A man whose age, name, parentage and schooling have shifted from one official document to the next, and who has never once sat before Nigerians and explained a single one of these contradictions.
Awolowo was a freedom fighter, a thinker, a builder of schools and institutions; you could disagree with him and still respect him. Obasanjo was a soldier who handed power to civilians in 1979 when he could have kept it.
Whatever their faults, both men had a record that existed independently of their own press releases. What is Tinubu’s?
A governorship built on a Lagos revenue machine whose books no one has ever been allowed to see, and a presidency built on a certificate no one can verify and a past he is paying lawyers in Washington to keep sealed.
So why the persistence? Why would any grown adult accept being laughed at by the whole country — by their own neighbours — for the sake of a man who has never once put himself at risk for them?
History gives us the answer, and it is not a comfortable one. Blind loyalty to a leader is never really about the leader. It is about the follower’s need not to have been wrong.
The longer you have defended the indefensible, the more expensive it becomes to stop. That is the psychology every cult of personality runs on.
After the Second World War, Germany and Austria had to be put through a formal programme of de-Nazification precisely because millions of otherwise ordinary people had tied their identity to one man and could not untie it on their own.
I am not comparing Nigeria’s crimes to Germany’s. I am comparing the mechanism — and the mechanism is the same.
That is the real damage Tinubu has done. Not only the naira, not only the debt, not only the DSS vans outside the homes of critics.
He has taught a section of his own people that loyalty to him matters more than truth, law, evidence or the good name of their own community. Undoing that will take longer than any election.
When the files are finally released — and they will be — his defenders will have a choice. They can say they were deceived, which is honest and forgivable.
Or they can keep defending him, which is neither. Nigeria will move forward either way. The only question is whether they intend to come with it.
Nigeria belongs to Nigerians.
NB: The 1993 Chicago matter (Case No. 93 C 4483) ended in a civil forfeiture settlement, not a criminal conviction. Mr Tinubu has denied wrongdoing.
The educational, identity and employment discrepancies referred to above are drawn from litigation records and public reporting; the interpretations are the author’s own.
