Let me declare my interest before I say anything else. I am not a neutral observer of this matter. I belong to the opposition. I want this President replaced at the next election, and I have said so publicly and repeatedly. Nothing in this article should be read as the detached commentary of a journalist. It is not.
But interest is not the same as bad faith. I am also a citizen of this Republic, and what is done to the standing of my country is done to me. On that ground I claim the right to speak, and I intend to use it.
Let’s begin with the oath.
Section 140 of our Constitution requires a President to swear the oath set out in the Seventh Schedule before he may exercise a single power of the office. That oath binds him to discharge his duties always in the interest of the sovereignty, integrity, solidarity, well-being and prosperity of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
It contains a further undertaking, in plain words: “that I will not allow my personal interest to influence my official conduct or my official decisions.”
Hold that sentence.
On 3 September 2026, the Nigerian State House issued an official statement on litigation pending before Judge Beryl A. Howell in Washington. It rehearsed the case history. It explained the exemptions claimed by American agencies. It defended the President’s reliance on his personal privacy. And it attacked Nigerians it considered politically connected to the pursuit of disclosure.
That was not a lawyer’s release. It was not a party statement. It was the institutional voice of the Federal Republic — official conduct, in the exact language of the oath — expended in the service of one man’s personal interest in a foreign courtroom.
I did not draft that oath. He swore it.
The Presidency will answer, as it has already answered, that the American proceedings are not a criminal trial of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. That may be correct. He has not been charged in that case. No court has convicted him of narcotics trafficking. He denies wrongdoing, and the presumption of innocence is his by right, as it is mine.
It is also not the question. Nobody said a records suit was a prosecution. The Presidency has answered a charge no serious person made and left standing the one that matters.
Here is what matters.
To learn what may lawfully be known about the man who governs more than 200 million of us, a Nigerian must consult a court docket in the District of Columbia, USA. He must wait on a filing deadline of 11 September fixed by an American judge. He must depend on the persistence of an American activist litigating since 2023 for reasons entirely his own. He must hope an American statute, written by Americans for Americans, is generously read.
That is the scandal. Not the redactions. The dependency.
The record deserves to be stated exactly, because exactness is the only weapon honest men carry.
American authorities investigated a heroin network operating in Illinois between 1988 and 1991. In January 1992, more than US$1.4 million in accounts linked to Bola Tinubu was frozen. A civil forfeiture action followed — an action against money, not the prosecution of a man. It ended in a negotiated settlement in 1993 under which US$460,000 held at First Heritage Bank in his name was forfeited to the United States government, and the balance returned to him.
I will not call him what I cannot prove. I have no need to. I need only ask why a man who tells us he has nothing to hide is spending Nigerian institutional authority to keep the pages shut.
Note what his own counsel argued in 2023, when petitioners cited that forfeiture before the Presidential Election Petition Court: that the American order had never been registered in any Nigerian court and could not bind us here.
That was a sovereignty argument. It said American process could not reach into Nigeria. I do not say it was a bad argument. I say it was a shield.
He has now carried that shield into the very forum whose reach he denied — not as a defendant compelled to appear, but voluntarily, by application, admitted as an intervenor. There he does not argue that American process cannot touch a Nigerian. He argues that an American statute must protect him, under Exemption 7(C) of the American Freedom of Information Act, which shields the personal privacy of a private individual.
That is sovereignty of convenience. The foreign forum has no authority over us when its record is inconvenient, and full authority to protect us when its statute is useful. And every Nigerian pays for it.
A President carries his country’s leverage in his person. He negotiates our debt, our security cooperation, our trade terms, our standing in every room he enters. When such a man is personally litigating against a foreign government to keep a foreign file sealed, he does not sit down at those tables as we would wish him to sit. This is not a matter of his dignity. It is a matter of our bargaining power, and ours is not his to spend.
The President litigates in Washington. His opponents lobby in Washington. Our journalists report Washington filings. Our citizens refresh an American docket. On this one point there is complete national unanimity.
That unanimity is not a defence for anybody. It is the indictment. Not one significant actor in our politics, including me, believes the answer can be found at home. We enacted a Freedom of Information Act in 2011. It cannot reach one page of this file. That is not America’s failure. It is ours.
The remedy, however, sits with one man. Bola Tinubu!
The exemptions claimed by the FBI and DEA protect real interests — grand jury secrecy, confidential sources, investigative technique, innocent third parties. Those must stand, and no responsible Nigerian should wish them brushed aside to satisfy political appetite. But American law also requires that every reasonably segregable portion of a record be released once what is genuinely exempt is removed.
And a personal privacy interest belongs to the person. What Exemption 7(C) shields for Bola Tinubu, Bola Tinubu may unshield. He _must_ instruct his lawyers to withdraw that objection insofar as it concerns him alone, and let the agencies guard what must truly be guarded.
The plaintiff files on 11 September. The President and the agencies respond by 18 September. The window is this month.
So let the exemptions stand wherever they protect the innocent. Let every separable page concerning President Tinubu personally be released. Let him waive what is his alone to waive. And let this Republic build the institutions that will spare the next generation the humiliation of learning about its own leaders from a foreign courtroom.
Privacy is the right of citizens. Concealment is not a power of the Presidency.
Mr. President, you swore not to let your personal interest influence your official conduct. On 3 September, your Presidency spoke for you in Washington. You may honour that oath before the month is out, with a single instruction to your lawyers.
Until you do, they remain what they are today: 399 pages Nigerians cannot read.
Dr. Pedro A. Obaseki is a filmmaker, broadcaster, playwright and political strategist; a former African Performance Consultant at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and former President of the Filmmakers’ Cooperative of Nigeria. He serves as an adviser to the ADC candidate, Atiku Abubakar
