By Dr. Bunmi Awoyemi
The latest political circus rolling out of the opposition’s propaganda factory is neither a legal revelation nor an electoral earthquake. It is an expensive exercise in self-deception.
After reportedly signing a $1.2 million contract with a Washington-based lobbying firm, a new industry appears to have emerged around Atiku Abubakar’s political project: the industrial-scale recycling of a thirty-three-year-old civil forfeiture proceeding into a mythical criminal scandal.
The strategy is simple.
Take an old case.
Remove its legal context.
Strip away every inconvenient fact.
Add dramatic headlines.
Feed it into social media.
Pass it through friendly media houses.
Then pray that repetition somehow transforms fiction into reality.
Unfortunately for the architects of this campaign, the law is not governed by wishful thinking, political desperation, or expensive lobbying contracts.
Facts remain stubborn things.
And the facts are devastating to the narrative being marketed.
The 1993 proceeding in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois was a civil forfeiture action.
Not a criminal trial.
Not a criminal prosecution.
Not a criminal indictment.
Not a criminal conviction.
Not a criminal sentencing.
Not a criminal record.
It was an in rem proceeding, meaning the action was brought against property, specifically bank accounts, rather than against Bola Ahmed Tinubu as a criminal defendant.
That distinction is not a technicality.
It is the entire case.
Without that distinction, the entire propaganda structure collapses like a house of cards in a hurricane.
The defendant was not Bola Tinubu.
The defendant was a bank account.
A bank account.
Not a person.
Not a candidate.
Not a criminal defendant.
Not a convicted felon.
A bank account.
Yet political propagandists continue to market the matter as though they have uncovered the legal equivalent of Watergate.
One is tempted to ask: if this case contained the criminal smoking gun they claim exists, where is the criminal conviction?
Where is the indictment?
Where is the prosecution?
Where is the sentencing order?
Where is the prison term?
Where is the criminal record?
Where are the follow-up criminal proceedings?
The answer remains exactly what it has been for over three decades:
They do not exist.
Because they never existed.
Because the case was never a criminal prosecution.
And there is another inconvenient fact the propaganda machine would rather bury beneath its avalanche of headlines: Tinubu continued living in Chicago after the civil matter concluded.
That fact matters enormously when juxtaposed against the feverish suggestion that the forfeiture proceeding somehow represented an unresolved criminal prosecution hanging over his head.
It did not.
There was no subsequent criminal prosecution arising from that forfeiture proceeding.
There was no criminal trial culminating in a conviction.
There was no criminal sentence.
There was no judicial declaration converting the civil settlement into criminal liability.
There was no American court subsequently pronouncing Bola Ahmed Tinubu guilty of a crime arising from the forfeiture case.
The civil matter concluded, and life continued.
Yet decades later, political entrepreneurs are attempting to resurrect the corpse of that concluded civil proceeding and dress it up as a criminal conviction that never happened.
That is not legal analysis.
That is political necromancy.
The matter ended through a compromise settlement.
The forfeiture was agreed.
Other funds were released.
Life moved on.
No criminal charges followed.
No criminal conviction emerged.
No criminal court pronounced Bola Ahmed Tinubu guilty of any offence.
No American prosecutor returned years later with a criminal case.
No federal grand jury issued an indictment.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
This is the inconvenient mountain of reality that no amount of lobbying expenditure can bulldoze.
The tragedy for the opposition is that they appear to believe that if they shout “drug trafficking” loudly enough, the public will forget the difference between an allegation and a conviction, between a civil proceeding and a criminal proceeding, between political rhetoric and legal fact.
That is a dangerous miscalculation.
The law is not a popularity contest.
The law is a system of definitions.
And under Nigerian law, disqualification from electoral contest is not triggered by opposition press conferences, foreign lobbying contracts, recycled newspaper headlines, political fantasies, or social-media hysteria.
It is triggered by legal conditions established by law.
Not imagination.
Not propaganda.
Not wishful thinking.
Law.
This is precisely why every attempt to transform the 1993 matter into an electoral nuclear weapon has repeatedly crashed into the brick wall of legal reality.
What we are witnessing today is therefore not a legal battle.
It is an archaeological expedition.
Political opponents are digging through a thirty-three-year-old site searching desperately for evidence that generations of lawyers, judges, investigators, prosecutors, tribunals, journalists, political opponents, intelligence agencies, and courts somehow failed to find.
They are searching for a ghost.
A phantom indictment.
An imaginary conviction.
A mythical criminal judgment.
A legal unicorn.
And after decades of digging, they continue to emerge from the tunnel empty-handed.
The absurdity becomes even more striking when one considers a simple question.
If the evidence supposedly establishes a criminal offence so conclusively, why did no criminal prosecution materialize after the civil matter was resolved?
Why did the United States not proceed with criminal charges?
Why did federal authorities not seek a conviction?
Why was there no criminal trial?
Why was there no guilty verdict?
Why was there no sentence?
Why was Tinubu able to continue living in Chicago after the civil proceeding concluded without a subsequent criminal prosecution arising from it?
The silence is deafening.
The reason is obvious.
Because the narrative being marketed today is far more dramatic than the legal reality that actually existed.
And that is the fundamental problem facing the opposition.
Politics cannot repeal facts.
Lobbyists cannot rewrite court records.
Media repetition cannot manufacture criminal convictions.
Social media outrage cannot create indictments retroactively.
A million dollars spent on narrative management cannot alter what the legal documents actually say.
Nor can it change the outcome of an election.
The assumption that voters will suddenly abandon their economic interests, political preferences, regional calculations, party loyalties, and governance assessments because opponents have once again repackaged a decades-old civil forfeiture proceeding is not merely optimistic.
It is delusional.
The opposition has spent years promising a political apocalypse that never arrives.
Each season comes with a new “final revelation.”
Each revelation is advertised as the silver bullet.
Each silver bullet turns out to be a rubber toy.
Then the cycle begins again.
Another headline.
Another press release.
Another manufactured frenzy.
Another expensive attempt to turn legal smoke into political fire.
But smoke is not fire.
Allegation is not conviction.
Narrative is not evidence.
A civil forfeiture is not a criminal conviction.
And repetition is not proof.
The opposition may continue excavating the archives of 1993 for another decade if it wishes.
It may spend another $1.2 million.
Or $12 million.
Or $120 million.
It may commission lobbyists, consultants, public-relations firms, influencers, activists, talking heads, and social-media armies.
None of that changes the central fact.
The legal record remains what it has always been.
A civil forfeiture proceeding.
No criminal conviction.
No criminal indictment.
No criminal sentence.
No subsequent criminal prosecution arising from that forfeiture case.
No judicial transformation of a civil settlement into criminal liability.
No political magic.
Just a political opposition desperately chasing a ghost through the corridors of history and hoping that noise can succeed where evidence has failed.
They are not exposing a criminal conviction.
They are recycling a civil proceeding.
They are not uncovering a new scandal.
They are repackaging an old document.
They are not presenting an electoral game-changer.
They are desperately trying to manufacture one.
And the more ferociously they insist that a civil forfeiture is a criminal conviction, the more they expose the poverty of the case they are trying to make.
The battlefield is not the archive.
It is the electorate.
And the electorate is not obligated to surrender its judgment to an opposition propaganda machine merely because that machine has hired expensive lobbyists in Washington.
History suggests otherwise.
Reality remains undefeated.
And no amount of political desperation can manufacture a conviction where none exists.
Dr. Bunmi Awoyemi is a Real Estate Developer, Builder and Public affairs Analyst.
