The Files Will Come: Why November, Not Abuja Will Decide The Tinubu Question
I have deliberately held my pen on the delayed FBI and DEA files concerning Bola Tinubu and the Chicago narcotics investigation.
By Kio Amachree
I have deliberately held my pen on the delayed FBI and DEA files concerning Bola Tinubu and the Chicago narcotics investigation. The matter remains ongoing — but ongoing behind closed doors, which is simply unacceptable given what those files mean to the Nigerian people. Judge Beryl Howell's court ordered disclosure. The deadline passed. The agencies have not complied. The Nigerian people are still waiting for documents that belong, by right of law and history, in the public record.
But I believe the dam is about to break, and the reason is not in Washington's goodwill. It is in Washington's weakness.
Iran now holds the upper hand. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed to commercial shipping. Bab el-Mandeb is blockaded by Tehran's Houthi allies. Both of the world's most critical maritime chokepoints are now controlled or contested by Iran and its proxies. Months of American bombing have produced no capitulation — only depleted arsenals. Patriot interceptor stockpiles are down by two-thirds, THAAD by half, and the Pentagon's own assessments warn of a near-term risk of running out of ammunition. And the missiles cannot be replaced, because the same China that Trump slapped with tariffs has cut off the rare earth materials without which no modern missile can be built. Instead, Beijing supplies Tehran.
Last month it emerged that Trump had to be smuggled off Air Force One in Turkey — moved by catering truck onto a decoy aircraft — because of a credible Iranian threat to assassinate him. Iran is doing to Trump what it did to Jimmy Carter: humiliating a sitting American president, refusing to negotiate, and making him look weak before voters already furious that he took their country to war.
His polling reflects it. And if, as expected, the Democrats take both houses in November, the reckoning begins: impeachment proceedings, cabinet members investigated, Hegseth under pressure to resign, the Trump children hauled before courts for self-enrichment — and, crucially for Nigeria, an FBI finally compelled to comply with the court order and release the Tinubu files.
The protection racket that has shielded Abuja's secrets in Washington is built on one man's political survival. That survival is now in doubt.
It's wait and see time. But not for much longer.
Kio Amachree is Founder and President of Worldview International, Stockholm.
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