By Kio Amachree
On 17 September, Bola Tinubu sat down to a private dinner with Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace. Warm words, photographs, no deal, no communiqué, nothing a Nigerian can eat.
Five days later, on 22 September, the eighty-first session of the United Nations General Assembly opened in New York. Twenty-four Nigerian government officials and senior presidential aides are listed for that trip. The President of the Federal Republic is not among them. The Presidency has announced a three-week European holiday and has said nothing about New York. Vice President Shettima, who stood in for him at the last two sessions, is expected to stand in for him again.
Three General Assemblies. Three absences. A Nigerian president who cannot find his way to the one room in the world where his country gets to speak for itself.
Now ask why, because the answer that has been reported is worse than the absence.
According to The Whistler, citing a security source, what kept him away was intelligence that Nigerians living in the United States were planning to protest and heckle him in New York — a protest connected to the campaign to have the records of his activities in Chicago in the early 1990s released. Not a security threat from a foreign enemy. Not a coup at home. Nigerians. On a pavement. With placards.
That is the state of this presidency. He will cross a continent for a private dinner with a French president because nobody there will ask him anything he does not wish to answer. He will not cross the Atlantic to address the world on behalf of two hundred and thirty million people because his own citizens might shout at him from behind a barrier.
I want to be careful and fair here, because I insist on it in everything I write. The Presidency has not confirmed his absence and has not given a reason for it. Nigeria’s Permanent Representative said earlier that the President had agreed to attend, and some outlets reported he would address the Assembly on 23 September. So let the Presidency say plainly, today, whether he is going, and if not, why not. The delegation list is public. His name is not on it. That is the record, and the record is what I answer.
But I am entitled to say what this looks like to me, and I will.
My father, Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC, was the first African to serve as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. He carried the Trusteeship portfolio through the Congo crisis. I spent part of my childhood in that building. I know what that podium cost, and I know who paid for the right of an African to stand behind it and be heard as an equal. Men of my father’s generation argued Nigeria into the room. They did not treat it as optional. They did not skip it because someone outside might be rude.
And this is not a small forfeit. UNGA week is not ceremony. It is where the security partnerships get negotiated, where the investment conversations start, where a country with our problems — the kidnappings, the killings in the north, the naira, the debt — either makes its case or does not. Twenty-four officials will make the trip and spend the money. The one man whose voice carries will not be there to use it.
Consider the arithmetic of this presidency’s travel. Paris in June 2023. A state visit to Paris in November 2024. Paris again in February 2025 and May 2026. Paris again this week. Three weeks in Europe on holiday. And New York, three years running, delegated.
It connects to the other thing he is doing with his time. On 28 August he went into a United States federal court and asked a judge to keep FBI and DEA records concerning him sealed. The New York protest he is reportedly avoiding is about those very records. So the pattern holds in both cities: wherever the questions are, he is not.
A president who will not face a protest cannot face a country.
So here is what I want.
One. Let the Presidency state today whether the President will attend the 81st General Assembly, and if he will not, give Nigerians the reason in writing.
Two. Publish the delegation list, the full cost of the trip, and what each of the twenty-four officials is going to New York to do.
Three. Withdraw the 28 August filing and consent to the release of the FBI and DEA records, with only lawful redactions.
Four. Publish the Code of Conduct Bureau asset declaration in full, and the DCI Group lobbying contract with the approvals behind it.
Five. Resign.
I put the fifth on the list because I have asked for the first four, in public, for two years, and received silence. A leader who will not answer his people, will not stand before the nations, and will not open a file, has told us everything we need to know about his confidence in his own record.
He should come home and face Nigerians. If he will not face them in New York, he certainly cannot govern them from Paris.
For the avoidance of doubt: the 1993 Chicago matter was a civil forfeiture, not a criminal conviction, and the matters referred to here are allegations that have been tested in no court. I raise them as questions demanding answers, not as verdicts. The Presidency has not confirmed the President’s absence from the General Assembly, and the reported reason for it is a press account attributed to an unnamed source, not an established fact. I state it as reporting, and I invite the Presidency to correct it.
Nigeria belongs to Nigerians.
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