How Nigeria Elected a Criminal as Its President: Part I

The Twisted Trail of Bola Tinubu

Bola Tinubu (Photograph: Wikipedia)

If you haven’t heard of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, it’s not your fault. American media simply prefers not to devote its steadily-dwindling resources to African nations and their rotating cast of over-the-top-corrupt leaders. I certainly hadn’t heard of Tinubu until last year, when an obscure case on PlainSite, the legal and financial information service I founded with two friends at Stanford as a side-project in 2011, eclipsed interest in Elon Musk, rising to #1 on the list of most frequently viewed cases.

The caption for that case was “USA v. Acct 263226700, et al,” a not particularly helpful description of what it was about. In Latin, “et al” means “and others,” so the case was essentially the United States versus a group of numbered bank accounts. You’ll frequently see these kinds of “United States v. [inanimate object]” cases when the dispute is a civil forfeiture action, meaning that the government took possession of someone’s stuff, whether it’s cars or cash or 50,000 cardboard boxes. Looking further into the case, I saw that it was filed in 1993, that many of the bank account defendants were held by someone named Bola Tinubu, and that there were no documents accessible on PACER, the federal court database where you’d normally expect to find them.

Bola Tinubu is now widely recognized as the President of Nigeria, but when USA v. Acct 263226700, et al became the most viewed case on PlainSite, Tinubu was merely a presidential candidate running against several others. The fact that he had been Governor of Lagos State didn’t hurt his chances. Neither did the fact that practically no one knew about his history with the United States justice system.

In a way, this wasn’t too surprising. The commercial internet didn’t even exist until 1995, and PACER didn’t start reliably cataloging the proceedings of the federal courts until about ten years after that. Generally, when you find a case involving docket entries from before 2005, it’s a safe bet that you’ll have to ask that someone dig paper files out of a box somewhere (usually for a fee), if that box can still be located. Also, the case title made it less than obvious what was really going on.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to travel far to find the documents from 1993. A Nigerian media outlet called Sahara Reporters had already gotten their hands on paper copies, which were posted on their website as one big Adobe Acrobat PDF file. Unfortunately, the document looked like it had been scanned with whatever the equivalent of an Atari 2600 would be for scanners. The words were barely legible and the whole thing looked like maybe someone had manufactured it in Photoshop. So even though the file had been out there for years on this obscure (at least to American eyes) Nigerian website, there was understandably skepticism in the Nigerian on-line community that the documents were even real.

Having worked on the problem of digital judicial records for over a decade, however, I could tell that the documents were real. I separated out each one and matched it to the proper slot on the 1993 docket—a basic task that no other website had ever done with respect to this particular case.¹

With the documents in their proper locations on PlainSite, it was a bit easier to figure out what the case was actually about. There was a great amount of detail in an affidavit written by Internal Revenue Service Special Agent Kevin Moss, which basically laid out the whole story. The United States had filed a civil forfeiture action not against Tinubu himself, but against his money, hidden away in bank accounts in Chicago, Fairfax, Virginia, and London. These accounts were opened in Tinubu’s own name, his wife’s name, and in the name of a company, or maybe two companies, with a presence in both Nigeria and Washington, D.C.: Compass Finance & Investment Company Limited (Nigeria), and Compass Investments Company Ltd. (Washington, D.C.). Tinubu was accused in the IRS affidavit of laundering money for a Chicago heroin distribution ring that sourced much of its product from Nigeria, thanks to a man named Mueez Adegboyega Akande. Akande handled the drugs with the help of his nephew, Abiodun Agbele. Tinubu handled the cash.

Based on my reading of the IRS affidavit filed by the United States Department of Justice in open court, Tinubu had committed at least six federal crimes. He ultimately settled the case with the United States government, which took $460,000 of his money and sent it to the Federal Reserve Bank for destruction. The rest, it seems—about $1 million—he got to keep. Meanwhile, those on the front lines selling drugs in Gary, Indiana went to prison.

After reading the grainy pages over a few times, there was one question that nagged at me: why wasn’t Tinubu criminally charged? For someone who had lied to federal law enforcement, failed to file a tax return, conspired to launder money, actually laundered money, defrauded multiple banks, and used funds from unlawful activity, it seemed like he got off pretty light. There were other questions as well. Why were his civil forfeiture case materials not available on PACER like every other federal civil lawsuit? Could the intelligence community have something to do with this state of affairs? And could this guy really become Nigeria’s President?

Well, as it turned out, he could, and in short order, he did.

As to the other questions, they’d prove a bit more difficult to answer.

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The traffic to PlainSite was coming from social media discussion of a publication called West Africa Weekly, which had written up a fantastic expose of Tinubu and his involvement with narcotrafficking. I quickly got in touch with its author, independent journalist David Hundeyin, and offered to help. One idea I had was to file some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about Tinubu and his associates in the heroin trade that might help fill in some of the gaps in the story.

So, over a period of a few months in 2022 and early 2023, I filed nine FOIA requests with six federal agencies: the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It took a while, but eventually, all of them were effectively denied. One of the FBI responses politely informed me that it might be able to start producing documents in the year 2026.

Fortunately, I tend to be persistent when it comes to bureaucracy. I appealed the denials and delay tactics (except for the CIA, which simply forgot about my request and later sent a letter apologizing, which it later refused to acknowledge it had sent). The appeals were also, unsurprisingly, denied, on the grounds that Tinubu and Akande were entitled to personal privacy under the FOIA statute’s oft-cited Exemptions 6 and 7(C). That presented the opportunity to sue, which given the stakes, seemed like it might be worthwhile—especially after Tinubu “won” the election in February 2023.

I filed the initial complaint in court on June 12, 2023. (Later on, I amended it after the CIA issued its apology to include the CIA as a defendant.) Much to my surprise, after the lawsuit was filed, some of the United States government agencies had a change of heart and by September, agreed to start actually producing documents. There was a catch, however: they would not confirm or deny that the documents had anything to do with Bola Tinubu—only the Edwards drug ring in Indiana.

This is where things get a bit complicated. Everything with Bola Tinubu is kind of complicated. As David Hundeyin pointed out in his article, is Bola Tinubu even his real name? There are reasons to believe that the answer is “probably not.” Does it matter at this point? Not really. But while I was puzzling over the government’s refusal to admit what it had already clearly admitted in 1993—that documents exist about Tinubu—there were other more recent controversies that proved to be massive distractions.

It’s incontrovertible that Tinubu lied when he told the Nigerian public that he had attended the University of Chicago. He didn’t. But he did go to school in the Chicago area, at Southwestern College (now Richard J. Daley College) before he transferred to Chicago State University to study accounting.² At this point, his academic records have surfaced from both institutions, and there was even a federal court case concerning the diploma he submitted to Nigeria’s election commission, which was, for whatever reason (probably that he lost the original), fake. But even despite the fake diploma which one of his staff members probably generated on a diploma mill website to avoid the embarrassment of having lost the original, Tinubu did graduate from Chicago State University.

The confusion doesn’t stop there, however. One of his records from the registrar’s office states that Tinubu’s “sex” is “F”. Is this a one-letter typo or a sign that he stole the identity of a woman named Bola Tinubu? It’s most likely just an error on the part of a (probably) white American working in the Chicago State University registrar’s office around 1977 who was unfamiliar with Nigerian names and perhaps assumed that a first name ending in the letter “A” belonged to a female. Tinubu appears in the school’s yearbook looking very much like an “M”. But even this is not without some confounding factor, because he is listed in the 1980 yearbook—there was no yearbook in 1979, when he graduated—and he is listed under the wrong name (as are many students whose names have ridiculous typos) as “BOLA A. THUBV”.³

So, going back to the main question: why wouldn’t the United States Government simply state the obvious, which is that it is sitting on a trove of documents about Nigeria’s president from his days laundering money? Before I could get an answer from the United States Department of Justice, representing the defendants in my lawsuit, on October 18, 2023, I received a strange notification in my inbox. A Washington, D.C. lawyer named Bryan Carey had filed an appearance on my behalf in the lawsuit, and he was sponsoring another lawyer named Christopher W. Carmichael from outside of the District of Columbia. This was remarkable because I had no idea who Bryan Carey was, let alone Christopher W. Carmichael.

I called Bryan Carey on the phone a few minutes later. He admitted that he had no idea what case he had even filed in, and that he was just following orders someone had relayed to him. He promised to get back to me.

Soon after, he did. Carey had filed in the correct case, but for the wrong party. He explained that he did not represent me, and would be re-filing his paperwork, which was filed in error. In fact, Carey and Carmichael represented someone else.

They represented the President of Nigeria, Bola Tinubu, who had decided to intervene in my case.

To be continued in Part II…

1. Some may be familiar with CourtListener, which is now PlainSite’s biggest competitor. CourtListener’s operator, Mike Lissner, who heads the Free Law Project, has an aversion to posting court documents provided by third parties, and so to this day the CourtListener docket for the case is more or less blank. I’d later learn why CourtListener could never get the documents from the court itself.

2. A letter floating around on the internet from the FBI dated July 28, 2011 suggests that “Bola Tinubo,” with an O, never attended Chicago State University per its registrar. If authentic, this letter doesn’t say much about the “I” part of the FBI.

3. Also listed on the same page as Tinubu is “YUETTE TRIMMS,” whose first name is almost certainly Yvette, not to mention “YUONNE TRIMMS,” whose first name is almost certainly Yvonne. Apparently proofreading was not taught at Chicago State University in 1979. Or 1980.