AN OPEN LETTER TO THE NORTH OF NIGERIA

 AN OPEN LETTER TO THE NORTH OF NIGERIA

By Kio Amachree, President, Worldview International

To the leaders, elders, and people of Northern Nigeria,

I write to you not as a stranger, but as a friend — and friendship demands honesty.

I write as a man of the Niger Delta, of Ijaw royal lineage, who nonetheless holds the North in deep personal affection. I was a teenager at Eton College when Hassan Katsina, one of the great sons of the North, came to visit me. He took a personal interest in my education — in what kind of Nigerian I would become. He taught me polo. He believed in me. Umaru Dikko Shinkafi was a mentor, a father figure to me. These were men of honour, men of a North that was proud, dignified, and incorruptible.

I remember leaving my briefcase at the airport in Minna, Niger State — containing $110,000 in cash. It was returned to me. Not one dollar missing. That is the North I knew. That is the North I love.

That North must now stand up — because it is in mortal danger of being permanently destroyed by a man who never loved it.

Break any agreement you have made with Bola Tinubu.

The man who sits in Aso Rock was never your ally. He used you to reach power, and now that he has it, the agenda is clear: to entrench a Lagos mafia — his family’s mafia — over every institution, every revenue stream, and every appointment in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He intends to rule for the rest of his life and, when he cannot rule himself, to hand the presidency to his son Seyi, in the manner of a Lebanese merchant dynasty, not a democratic republic.

Thirteen billion dollars of Nigerian public money has been channelled through contracts awarded to Gilbert Chagoury — a man with a Swiss money laundering conviction, a man named in FBI and DEA intelligence files as a Hezbollah financier, a man so tainted that the United States of America has banned him from entering its territory. No procurement framework. No competitive tender. No accountability to the Nigerian people who paid for it.

And now — on the order of United States Federal Judge Beryl Howell — the FBI and DEA files on Tinubu himself must be declassified and released by June 2026. The North needs to ask itself: do you want your name, your future, and your children’s inheritance attached to a man whose criminal history is about to be laid bare before the world?

The agreement you made was with a man who destabilises states for personal gain — who turned Rivers State into a battleground, who arms political factions, who uses the instruments of the Nigerian state as weapons against his own citizens. Who has been credibly connected to the heroin trade.

This is not partnership. This is subjugation.

If the North does not break from this alliance, history will record that the people who once guarded the briefcase of a stranger — who honoured their word, who built institutions, who produced soldiers and statesmen — chose instead to be the instrument by which a Lagos crime syndicate consumed a nation.

The marginalisation you fear from others is already being administered to you, quietly, by the man you empowered. The backwater he is creating — he is creating it everywhere except Eko Atlantic and the Chagoury concessions.

I am calling on Northern elders, governors, senators, traditional rulers, civil society, and ordinary citizens: withdraw your support. Demand accountability. Refuse to be used.

The North I knew was better than this. I am asking it to be itself again.

Kio Amachree is President, Worldview International. He writes from Stockholm.