BAYO ONANUGA FOUND WASHINGTON LONG BEFORE ATIKU DID
THE SUFFERING NIGERIAN MASSES DESERVE TO KNOW WHY THE UNITED STATES CALLED THAT MONEY HEROIN PROCEEDS, AND WHY $460,000 WAS SURRENDERED RATHER THAN DEFENDED IN COURT
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Yesterday the Presidency demanded to know when Atiku Abubakar will report himself to President Donald Trump.
Nigerians should ask a smaller and far more dangerous question. Who taught Bola Tinubu the road to Washington? It was not Atiku Abubakar. It was the man who signed that statement.
THE YEAR WAS 1993
In February 1993, Bayo Onanuga and Babafemi Ojudu founded TheNEWS, having walked out of African Concord rather than write an apology to a military dictator. Within months the magazine was proscribed, its editors declared wanted, eighty thousand copies of a single edition seized off the streets.
In July of that same year, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the Department of Justice filed a verified complaint seeking the civil forfeiture of funds it alleged were the proceeds of heroin trafficking and money laundering. It ended in a negotiated settlement under which $460,000 was surrendered to the treasury of the United States.
Two files opened in the same year. One made Bayo Onanuga a legend. The other now pays his salary.
He built a magazine in 1993 to ask where the money came from. In 2026 he is paid to make sure nobody asks.
THE MAN WHO WENT TO PRISON FOR ASKING THIS EXACT QUESTION
In August 1996 the State Security Service arrested Onanuga over a TheNEWS report on the Petroleum Minister Dan Etete, titled “The Man Abacha Cannot Touch”. The story alleged that state oil contracts were being handed to family and friends and that the regime would not probe it. Amnesty International reported he was held at the SSS Lagos headquarters and may have been ill treated. In March 1995 he had already been detained thirteen days without charge. A warrant went out for him in 1997. He ran.
Kunle Ajibade was sentenced to life imprisonment. James Bagauda Kaltho never came home at all.
Men were buried for one principle. That when a powerful man cannot explain his money, you print the question anyway.
When those documents resurfaced in November 2022, the response Onanuga published opened by announcing that the muckrakers were back in business. Read that again. The co-founder of Nigeria’s guerrilla press used muckraker as an insult. He told journalists the matter was dead as a dodo and pointed them to a campaign FAQ manual.
The man who once wrote cover stories that put him in a cell now answers the largest question of his career by handing out a leaflet. He has become, precisely and completely, the man Abacha could not touch.
AND THIS IS NOT THE FIRST BURIAL
In 1999 a young Speaker of the House of Representatives named Salisu Buhari was caught with a University of Toronto degree he never earned. The investigative press, TheNEWS loudest among them, hunted him until he resigned in shame. That is exactly what journalism is for.
In that same season, Chief Gani Fawehinmi laid a far heavier charge against the newly elected Governor of Lagos. On 5 October 1999 he went to court seeking an order of mandamus to compel the Attorney General and the Inspector General of Police to investigate documents he said were forged. Nothing came of it.
The columnist Obi Nwakanma, writing in Vanguard in November 2022, said what many in the Lagos press have only whispered. The magazine that roasted Salisu Buhari suppressed the more egregious case of Bola Tinubu, and the Editor in Chief and Chief Executive of that magazine at the time was Bayo Onanuga. Nwakanma called it one of his greatest disappointments with the Nigerian press, and he records that when the drug question rose again in 2003, that story too was buried.
A fake foreign degree destroyed a Speaker in six weeks. A contested history and a forfeited fortune produced a governor, and then a president.
Mr Onanuga, a story that had to be buried in 1999, buried again in 2003, buried again in 2022, buried again in 2023 and buried again this week is not a dead story. It is a body that keeps climbing out of the ground, because it was never lawfully laid to rest.
NOW LET US TALK ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY
Here the statement does not merely fail. It humiliates its author.
Bayo Onanuga did not tolerate foreign lobbying against a Nigerian government. He helped build it. When Abacha shut the presses, he published from foreign soil and helped run Radio Kudirat and Radio Freedom into Nigeria from outside the country, courting foreign parliaments, foreign broadcasters and foreign money. He was right to do so. Tyranny forfeits the protection of sovereignty.
And who else was in that operation? Bola Ahmed Tinubu. In his own words, published by PM News, the paper Onanuga founded, Mr Tinubu describes founding and coordinating Radio Kudirat and Radio Freedom, the two years he did not see his family, and the arrival of Bayo Onanuga to join them abroad in December 1997. Mr Tinubu spent those years lobbying the government of the United States to reverse the annulment of June 12, pouring resources into that campaign which Wole Soyinka and others have acknowledged.
Nobody in NADECO called that treason. Nobody called it externalising domestic politics. Nobody wrote a press statement about the wounded dignity of the Nigerian state.
They ran a foreign broadcasting operation against Nigeria from American soil and called it patriotism. A Nigerian hires an American lawyer and it becomes treason. The difference is not the principle. The difference is whose name is on the file.
And the question nobody has answered in twenty seven years still stands, because Nwakanma asked it in print and no palace has replied. Mr Tinubu was a treasurer at Mobil. Treasurers at Mobil do not fund transcontinental radio stations and multi year exile operations out of salary.
Nigerians were instructed to be grateful and forbidden to be curious. The man who built a career on curiosity about other men’s money enforced the ban.
HIS OWN MOUTH IS THE STATE’S WITNESS
Nobody needs Atiku Abubakar to establish the substance of the Chicago file. Onanuga established it himself, in public, more than once.
He narrated the FBI investigation by agent Kevin Moss into the accounts at First Heritage Bank and Citibank. The freezing order of 10 January 1992. The telephone call to Mr Tinubu in Nigeria about sums running to $1.4 million. The admission that part of that money had been lodged by two Nigerians under investigation for drug offences. The lawsuit Mr Tinubu’s American lawyers then filed to unfreeze the accounts. That is not opposition propaganda. That is the Presidency’s own account, volunteered without pressure.
Then in March 2023 he went further than any opponent required. He argued that the matter fell outside the ten year bar in section 137 of the Constitution, and that his principal could therefore be sworn in.
No innocent man’s spokesman pleads a limitation period. You do not plead a time bar for an event that never happened. You plead it for one that did.
And when ordinary Nigerians raised the question, he called them Obidiots, told citizens their days were numbered, and promised them the wrath of law and God. That is not the voice of a camp with nothing to hide. That is the voice of a camp frightened of a piece of paper in Chicago.
MEASURE ATIKU BY YOUR OWN RULE
The statement drags out the William Jefferson affair and the 2010 report of the United States Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Carl Levin. Good. Apply the exact standard the Presidency invented three paragraphs earlier in its own document.
Atiku Abubakar has never been charged, never tried, never convicted, in the United States or anywhere on earth. No court has ever ordered him to forfeit one dollar as suspected proceeds of crime. Not one dollar. Not one court.
If a Senate report that produced no charge is fair political material, then a forfeiture action that produced a settlement and $460,000 handed to a foreign treasury is fair political material a hundred times over.
You cannot forge a shield and a spear from the same metal and then demand that only the spear be inspected.
WHAT THE SILENCE HAS COST
This was never an antiquarian quarrel about a Chicago bank account. It is about what a country becomes when it decides that its rulers need not answer plain questions.
Nigeria scored 26 out of 100 in the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, 142nd of 182 countries, one year after the President stood on a stage in Brazil and told the world that corruption had been eliminated in Nigeria. The International Monetary Fund has reported trillions of naira moving outside the national budget, and the Federal Government’s answer was a denial rather than an audit.
Meanwhile the country pays. Families that ate three times a day now ration. Mothers water the soup. Farmers are cut down in the fields that feed us, and the harvest rots because nobody dares go out to bring it in. Children are taken from their classrooms and their parents are told to pray and wait. Pensioners die waiting for money they earned in service to this country. Doctors trained with public money queue at foreign embassies, and the best of our graduates now measure success by how quickly they can leave the land of their birth.
A nation that would not ask one question in 1993 is now asked to swallow all of that in silence, and to call it Renewed Hope.
THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE, AND HE IS ON THE BALLOT
Nigerians are not being asked merely to reject something. They are being offered something.
Atiku Abubakar is a man who built enterprises that employed Nigerians, who founded a university in Yola when he could have banked the money abroad, and who served in a government under which this economy grew from roughly 58 billion dollars in 1999 to about 270 billion dollars in 2007. Whatever else is said of him, he has never asked any Nigerian to accept an unexplained fortune, and no court anywhere has ever required him to surrender one.
With Rotimi Amaechi beside him, he offers a government of experience rather than improvisation. That is the choice on 16 January 2027.
16 JANUARY 2027
Atiku Abubakar has not asked any foreign power to choose Nigeria’s president. Nigerians will do that themselves, and no Washington lobbying firm and no statement from Aso Rock will cast a single ballot.
What Nigerians are owed is one answer, from the President himself, in his own voice, to his own people. Not from a spokesman. Not from a FAQ manual. Thirty three years is a very long silence.
Mr Onanuga, you were the field marshal of Nigeria’s guerrilla journalists. Men went to prison beside you, and one of them never came home, for the right to ask exactly this question.
You did not change employer. You changed sides.
The file is not dead. It was never ours to bury. And after everything you once were, it was certainly not yours to close.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
23 July 2026
