By Kio Amachree
I am sitting in a beautiful house in a civilised country on a glorious spring day in Stockholm, and I am genuinely struggling to understand what is happening in the minds of my people.
Bola Tinubu has gifted Gilbert Chagoury — a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire convicted in Switzerland of laundering money for Sani Abacha — contracts worth over **$13 billion** of Nigerian public money. Without a competitive tender. Without public bidding. Without accountability. Without shame.
The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway alone: **$13 billion** to Hitech Construction, a Chagoury subsidiary. No open bid. No transparency. The Federal Executive Council nodded it through.
The Tin Can and Apapa port refurbishment: **N1.1 trillion** — again to ITB Nigeria, another Chagoury subsidiary — despite what critics describe as no meaningful experience in seaport construction.
Snake Island port concession: **$1 billion**. 45 years. Again into the Chagoury orbit.
And in January 2026, President Tinubu conferred on Gilbert Chagoury the **Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger** — Nigeria’s second-highest national honour. A man convicted of money laundering. A man whose parents were not Nigerian. A man who holds a Nigerian passport through naturalisation. Given the second-highest award this nation can bestow.
And Tinubu’s own son, Seyi Tinubu, sits on the board of **CDK Integrated Industries** — a Chagoury Group subsidiary. Seyi was also a majority shareholder alongside Ronald Chagoury Jr. in a company incorporated in the **British Virgin Islands**, confirmed by documents reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Now let me talk about the thing that is truly breaking my heart.
Because while all of this is happening — while billions are being transferred in broad daylight to a convicted foreign money launderer — what fills my timeline? What fills the comment sections? What fills the group chats and the Twitter threads and the Facebook pages of educated, grown Nigerian adults?
**Your tribe.**
Not the $13 billion. Not the missing tender. Not the offshore BVI company connecting the President’s son to the contractor’s son. Not the Swiss conviction. Not the second-highest national honour given to a man who should not even hold a Nigerian passport. Not one word about any of it.
Your tribe. Your village. Your governor. Your senator. Your people. Whether the Igbo got enough. Whether the Yoruba are dominating. Whether the North is being marginalised. Whether your particular ethnic group has been sufficiently represented in a cabinet that is collectively looting the country into the ground.
This is the village mentality I am talking about. And I want to be precise about what I mean — because this is not an insult. It is a diagnosis.
The village mentality says: what matters is whether my man is at the table. Not whether the table itself is rotten. Not whether everything being served at that table was stolen before it arrived. Just whether my man has a seat. Whether my tribe is represented in the corruption. Whether we are getting our share of the nothing that is left after the real money has gone to Chagoury.
This mentality was designed. It was engineered. It has been maintained across decades of military rule and civilian kleptocracy precisely because it works. When Nigerians are fighting each other about Igbo and Yoruba and Hausa and Fulani and Ijaw and Tiv and Urhobo, nobody is asking where the $13 billion went. Nobody is asking why a man convicted of laundering Abacha’s stolen money is now the preferred contractor of the President of Nigeria. Nobody is filing petitions. Nobody is demanding accountability. The tribal argument is the perfect crime — it commits itself, it prosecutes itself, and it sentences the Nigerian people every single day.
I have written petitions. I have published investigations. I have documented every contract, every connection, every conviction, every passport question, every offshore company. I have sent material to editors, to activists, to lawyers, to diaspora groups. And what comes back? Silence on the substance. And somewhere in the noise, your tribe.
You are sitting in the dark because there is no electricity. Your car is parked because fuel is too expensive. Your children are hungry. Your oil infrastructure has collapsed. Your hospitals have no drugs. Your schools have no teachers. And the man who could have funded all of it has instead handed the money to one foreigner — a man convicted of money laundering — and that man’s son and the President’s son were in a company together in the British Virgin Islands.
This is not tribal politics. This is organised crime operating at the level of the state. And organised crime thrives on exactly one thing: a population too busy fighting itself to notice what is being taken from it.
**17 million Nigerians are living outside Nigeria**. We did not leave because we wanted to. We left because the madness inside made staying impossible. And from where we sit — in Stockholm, in London, in Houston, in Toronto — we can see the whole picture. We are not in the village. We are not playing the game. And we are telling you, clearly and without apology: **you are being robbed. And your tribe is not going to save you.**
Do you know what $13 billion can do for Nigeria?
It can rebuild every major hospital in the country. It can restore the national electricity grid. It can put food on the table of every school child from Lagos to Maiduguri. It can fund a generation of engineers, doctors and public servants. It can do everything Tinubu claims he wants to do — except he has given it, without a tender, to one man instead.
**One man. One Lebanese man. $13 billion. No competitive bid. No accountability. And you are in the comment section arguing about your tribe.**
I am not impressed. Not one tiny bit. And neither should you be — with yourselves.
Wake up, Nigeria. Because Gilbert Chagoury has been here for 55 years. He understands your weakness better than you do. And he is counting on the tribe to keep you distracted while the country is dismantled around you.
God knows I have tried. I have really tried.
Kio Amachree is President at WORLDVIEW Global Politics, Political Science, University of Pennsylvania. #KioAmachree | Stockholm, Sweden | President, Worldview International
