Exactly a week ago, I published what I consider to be one of the most important stories I have ever worked on. The story titled ‘Bola Ahmed Tinubu: From Drug Lord To Presidential Candidate’ has now been read more than 550,000 times according to the backend analytics on West Africa Weekly, my Substack publication.
Nobody sets out to write a story dragging the shameful drug trafficking history of a Frontline politician into the open, without expecting some sort of furious pushback. Given that the story subject comes from Nigeria of all places, I was under no illusions about the size and difficulty of the task I had taken upon myself, no matter how clear and unequivocal the evidence regarding the case was.
That notwithstanding, Nigeria has somehow managed to turn this into yet another teachable moment for any future Nigerian practitioners of the world’s most underappreciated profession, relative to its importance. The aftermath of the “Bola Ahmed story” as its working folder is sardonically named on my laptop, shows yet again the impossible lengths to which Nigerians on the side of power will attempt to keep a ‘fight’ going long after it has ended and the audience has gone home.
A Short Story From Iceland
Following the 2008 financial crisis, a story I read that stuck in my head forever came out of Iceland, which was probably the world’s worst affected country. That story, published in the UK Observer included firsthand narrations of how at the peak of the finance bubble, 35-year-olds who had always worked in Iceland’s busy fishing industry were quitting the fishing boats and becoming highly remunerated financial instrument salesmen and “investors” literally overnight.
Despite having zero knowledge of finance and quite literally no understanding of the sheer amount of risk inherent in the collateralised investments they were selling, Jonases and Fredriks found themselves using words they did not understand to sell abstract services they could not understand, in return for financial rewards that they also could not understand, relative to the lives they were hitherto used to. What happened next was all too predictable.
As soon as Lehmann Brothers suffered the dramatic public collapse many of us can remember, newly purchased Range Rovers across Iceland suddenly developed an amazing propensity to suddenly explode under unclear circumstances. News reports spoke of hundreds of Range Rovers exploding and being handed to insurance companies under the same unlikely circumstances, as Icelandic consumers rushed to get rid of expensive euro-denominated liabilities at a time when the krona fell 400% against the euro in the space of less than 3 months.
The Gunnars and Gudmundors who had transformed themselves into overnight masters of complicated Wall Street instruments invented by people with engineering PhDs, were forced to admit that they knew absolutely nothing about the world outside of their fishing boats, and they slowly returned, suitably chastised, to reality.
Something, Something, Indictment, Conviction…
I brought up the Icelandic tale as a case in point to illustrate what happens when a mass delusion takes hold, convincing several people at the same time that they are versed in matters they know absolutely nothing about. Matters such as the difference between civil forfeiture, criminal conviction and civil indictment under the American Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Exactly 2 days after my story went up, the first of these overnight Harvard Law School graduates started offering their gormless opinions about a case which has literally been open and shut since 1993. First came the meathead who described the story as an “old wives tale,” followed by another whose “rejoinder” had a headline with a huge grammatical blunder in it.
Predictably, the likes of TheCable, PM News and an eponymous website run by a GEJ presidential media aide who somewhat hilariously still fancies himself a journalist, were only too happy to platform this nonsense. If you are going to be a cash-and-carry media operation, best do it with zero apology and without any shame whatsoever, after all. I almost respect it. Anyway, I digress.
Read also: For Tinubu, his ‘lifelong ambition’ trumps the unity of Nigeria
The next wave of attacks has come from the endless maze of Tinubu’s sock puppet social media accounts with 100 followers, claiming that the absence of a criminal conviction in the case somehow serves as proof of innocence. For the avoidance of doubt, the case files not only state categorically that Bola Ahmed Tinubu was intimately involved with laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, but they also contain unimpeachable evidence that Tinubu and his wife Oluremi had extremely close ties with known heroin wholesalers to the point of opening joint bank accounts with them.
The narrative idea of Bola Tinubu being “innocent” because he went through a civil asset forfeiture process instead of a criminal trial, is born from the same mediocre-but-unbelievably-confident mental ecosystem that saw fishermen named Gylfi put on a suit and become “financial advisors” after watching a few YouTube videos about selling financial derivatives in 2008. And we know how that mass delusion ended.
Moreover, the brandishment of a document ostensibly from the US Embassy sometime in 2003 “clearing” Tinubu of drug offenses probably has the same kind of impact that Gudmundor the random boat-engine-operator-turned-finance-whiz-kid would have had on his family in 2007 when he sold them $100,000 worth of debt-funded nonsense they couldn’t afford, only to lose their jobs and see the krona value of their debt repayments shoot up 4x just a year later. That is to say, significant but regrettable. Despicable.
Building narrative fortresses inside the renowned ignorance of the Nigerian public is not a new game for political operators like Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Without the thick veil of public ignorance shielding him, he might very well be living out his final years in Kuje medium security prison after being tried for any of several fraud, embezzlement, racketeering and organised crime allegations that have been credibly made against him at different times. Like the Icelandic banks in 2008, Tinubu is an expert at exploiting public ignorance and avoiding personal consequences when the hens come home to roost.
That ultimately leaves it to Nigerians themselves to do to him what Iceland did to the banks in the aftermath of 2008. I’m not going to hold my breath on that, but posterity will at least note that I stood up to be counted when greater men than me sat mewling and sending “please don’t vote for Tinubu” tweets from their secret Twitter accounts.
I did something.
