NewzIt is indubitable, all pretensions to the contrary notwithstanding, that this is not the best of times for President Bola Tinubu. Granted, he is a hard guy – tough, unyielding and some will say lacking in empathy – but even the hardest of men have their vulnerable moments. This must be such a moment for Tinubu because nothing can be more unsettling for a leader than when the past, thought to have been successfully buried returns like a phoenix, an apparition of sorts, with old memories and unresolved events, haunting like a sudden ghost.
Nigerians are not spared because it is a nightmare for a people to have a leader who is haunted by his dark past. Right now President Tinubu is engaged in a mortal combat with his own past. He is doing everything humanly possible to ensure that whatever he did in Chicago, the largest city in the U.S.
state of Illinois more than three decades ago remains buried in the ash heap of history – completely forgotten. That may well have been the case if he had remained a private citizen. Tinubu is the President of Nigeria, a country with no less than 230 million people.
And it is only normal that the citizens know everything about him including his past. And that past includes what is already in the public domain. authorities carried out investigations into alleged drug trafficking involving Tinubu.
In 1993, $460,000 was seized from an account linked to him, a forfeiture tied to a Chicago heroin ring. Tinubu himself acknowledges this but his supporters claim that the forfeiture was civil in nature. He was neither charged with a criminal offense nor formally indicted, they chorus as if that deodorises the stench which the act emits.
His opponents demur, insisting that he was criminally charged. In 2022, an American researcher, Aaron Greenspan, who runs the transparency platform PlainSite, filed 12 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with six U.S. federal agencies seeking information relating to the Chicago heroin ring.
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