By Kio Amachree
Dear Mr. Secretary,
You were once a guest of my late father, Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC, Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General and Africa’s first Under-Secretary-General at the United Nations. You came and had dinner at our home on Bourdillon Road in Ikoyi, Lagos. Your late father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was my father’s guest at our home in Westchester, New York, in the early sixties, and your family home stood just around the corner from ours in McLean, Virginia. We have history: two powerful families, one powerful cause — the pursuit of truth. You are a Harvard man; I am a Wharton man, the University of Pennsylvania, like your boss, the President of the United States.
Mr. Secretary, Nigeria is in serious trouble. We have a president who is causing 230 million Nigerians untold grief. Our security situation is in shambles. Ethnic divisions are at an all-time high. The economy is in free fall. Corruption is out of control. And atop all of this sits a president whose past in Chicago is entangled with the heroin trade — a president who forfeited 460,000 dollars to the United States government in 1993, money the authorities traced to the proceeds of narcotics trafficking, a forfeiture he accepted rather than contest.
Questions about his name, his age, his education, even his very nationality abound in Nigeria. I suspect the answers lie in the files the FBI, the CIA, and the DEA hold in Washington — files these agencies refuse to release to the public on worn-out, flimsy grounds that, after thirty-three years, have no relevance in the modern world. A federal judge, the Honourable Beryl Howell, has already ordered these agencies toward disclosure, and still they resist.
Mr. Secretary, you are your nation’s top health czar. You know, better than almost anyone in public life, the damage heroin and hard drugs do to human lives. You have spoken about the horrors of heroin and addiction both publicly and privately, with the moral authority of a man who has lived that truth. That is why I address this letter to you and not to another.
I ask you, on behalf of 230 million Nigerians, to look into this matter and to convince your boss, President Trump, to order these files released. The Tinubu files must be made known so that Nigerians can determine what sort of man is ruling them, and whether he lied to the millions of suffering people over whom he presides. We need to know his true identity, and we need to know the full depth of his involvement in the narcotics trade that led the American authorities to strip him of 460,000 dollars.
I ask you as an old family friend. I ask you for your love of Africa and of Nigeria. And I ask you in the hope that relations between Nigeria and the United States do not fall into the gutter because of this embarrassing situation, which sunlight alone can cure. Your father believed that each time a man stands up for an ideal, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. Send forth that ripple now, Mr. Secretary. Nigeria is waiting.
Thank you.
Kio Amachree
Founder and President, Worldview International
Stockholm, Sweden
