What Is Happening To Our Country Under Tinubu — And Why You Should Be Terrified
I want you to read this slowly.
Not because it is complicated.
Because it is so clear — so documented, so brazen, so complete — that the instinct will be to dismiss it as impossible.
It is not impossible. It is happening. Right now. In your name. With your money. On your soil.
Nigeria is being handed over.
Not by force. Not by coup. Not by foreign invasion.
By a president who has systematically transferred the most strategic assets of Africa’s most populous nation — its highways, its ports, its coastline, its maritime future — into the hands of a convicted money launderer, a man banned from entering the United States on terrorism-related grounds, a man flagged by American intelligence for suspected links to Hezbollah financing.
His name is Gilbert Ramez Chagoury.
And he is not alone.
THE MAN AT THE TOP
Gilbert Chagoury is 81 years old. He is Lebanese-born. He has never stood for election in Nigeria. He commands no democratic mandate from the Nigerian people. He holds a St. Lucia diplomatic passport that shields him from scrutiny he richly deserves.
In the 1990s, Chagoury set up accounts in Geneva for the Abacha family, enabling illegal transfers of over $120 million from the Central Bank of Nigeria. A Swiss court convicted him of money laundering and aiding a criminal organisation. He paid $600,000 in fines and returned $66 million to the Nigerian government. 
He laundered Abacha’s stolen billions — stolen from you, from your hospitals, your roads, your schools — and the fine he paid was a rounding error on what he kept.
He was subsequently banned from entering the United States over alleged support for Hezbollah and involvement in illegal political donations. He helped fund the campaign of a U.S. congressman who was later convicted. Chagoury paid $1.8 million to resolve that investigation. 
Now look at what this man — this convicted, Hezbollah-linked, America-banned man — has received from President Bola Tinubu:
A $13 billion Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway contract awarded to his Hitech Construction without any open competitive bidding process. 
In 2025, his ITB Construction Nigeria Limited was selected to refurbish Tin Can and Apapa ports in a contract worth N1.1 trillion, despite lacking extensive seaport construction experience. 
Then a 45-year concession for the Snake Island Port container terminal in Lagos — giving a Lebanese family control over how Nigeria’s commercial capital handles maritime trade until the year 2071. 
Critics have put the total value of contracts flowing to Chagoury Group entities under the Tinubu administration at approaching ₦20 trillion. 
Coastal highway. Tin Can. Apapa. Snake Island — for 45 years. All without competitive bidding. All to the same man. All from the same president.
And then — the final insult — Tinubu secretly conferred on Chagoury Nigeria’s second-highest national honour, the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger, on January 8, 2026. The presidency made no announcement. Nigerians only found out when a billionaire posted the certificate on social media. 
Nigeria’s second-highest honour. Whispered out through Instagram. To a man America will not let through its airports.
THE FAMILY MERGER
This goes deeper than friendship. This is a merger of dynasties — and that is precisely why no Nigerian institution has been able to stop it.
Leaked documents from the OCCRP reveal that Seyi Tinubu, the president’s son, was a majority shareholder in an offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands alongside Ronald Chagoury Jr., son of billionaire Ronald Chagoury. BVI secrecy laws typically shield ownership details — but the documents leaked. 
Seyi Tinubu is also confirmed as a director on the board of CDK Integrated Industries, a Chagoury Group subsidiary — and CDK’s parent company is Hitech Construction, the very entity that received the $13 billion coastal highway contract. 
The president’s son. On the board. Of the contractor’s subsidiary. While his father signs the contracts. While his father secretly awards the contractor Nigeria’s second-highest national honour.
This is not a conflict of interest.
This is a merger of the Nigerian presidency with a Lebanese commercial empire.
THE BOULOS MACHINE
Chagoury is the most powerful. He is not the only one.
Massad Boulos spent thirty years in Lagos as CEO of SCOA Nigeria. He holds a Nigerian passport. He knows Nigeria’s commercial elite the way a man knows his own backyard. And he has a documented business relationship with Gilbert Chagoury — his company supplies equipment to Chagoury’s construction arm. 
His son Michael married Tiffany Trump. Trump appointed Massad Boulos Senior Advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs, then added Africa to his portfolio — making him the most senior U.S. official handling the African continent. 
Think about what that means. The man advising the President of the United States on all of Africa is a Lebanese-Nigerian businessman whose company supplies machinery to Gilbert Chagoury’s construction empire — the same empire receiving ₦20 trillion in Nigerian government contracts. Whether Boulos disclosed his business relationship with the Chagoury Group in his White House financial disclosures is a question the public cannot answer. The White House took its disclosures page offline shortly after Trump’s inauguration. 
Nigeria’s fate is being managed in Washington by a man commercially tied to the same Lebanese network that controls Lagos’s ports, highways, and coastline.
THE EL-KHALIL DYNASTY
Then there is the El-Khalil family — older, quieter, and in some ways more deeply embedded than either the Chagourys or the Bouloses.
Anwar M. El-Khalil was born in Lagos in 1938 to a Lebanese Druze family. He chaired Seven-Up Bottling Company in Nigeria from 1960 to 1990, ran M. El-Khalil Transport Limited — once the largest transport company in Africa — and chaired M. El-Khalil & Sons Properties in Nigeria, before eventually becoming a Member of the Lebanese Parliament. 
A man born in Lagos, who built his fortune in Nigeria, and went on to sit in Beirut’s parliament — representing Lebanese interests. That is the model in its purest form: extract from Nigeria, govern from Lebanon.
Farid El-Khalil joined Seven-Up Bottling Company in Nigeria in 1968, rose to Marketing Director, and oversaw its expansion into factories in Lagos, Ibadan and Kano.  In 1986, he became Managing Director of International Tobacco Company — a Philip Morris joint venture — in circumstances that I know personally and intimately, because it was my father, Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC, Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General and former UN Under-Secretary-General, who was removed as Chairman by the El-Khalil family bloc in a boardroom coup in Lausanne, Switzerland, on January 16 of that year.
Three members of the El-Khalil family were installed as directors in a single sitting — Anwar, Feysal, and Farid — while the Nigerian directors, led by my father, were manoeuvred out of the room. This was done in open violation of the Federal Military Government’s Nigerianisation Policy, which required key management positions to be held by Nigerians.
My father fought it in the Federal High Court in Lagos. He was right then. And the pattern he identified then — foreign commercial interests using procedural manipulation to displace Nigerian leadership and consolidate control — is precisely what we are watching at national scale today.
The El-Khalils went on. Seven-Up Bottling PLC, established by the El-Khalil family in 1960, became a major manufacturer of soft drinks in Nigeria  — a household name, embedded in Nigerian daily life, built on Nigerian labour and Nigerian consumers, with profits flowing to Beirut, to Lebanese banks, to Lebanese parliamentary campaigns.
THE OTHER NAMES
Amin Moussalli owns Cool FM, Wazobia FM, Wazobia TV, and Cool TV  — the radio stations and television channels that Nigerians wake up to every morning, that shape public opinion, that determine what conversations happen and which ones do not. A Lebanese family controls a significant portion of Nigeria’s airwaves. Ask yourself how often those platforms have run sustained investigative coverage of Lebanese commercial power in Nigeria.
The IHS Group — one of the largest telecommunications tower infrastructure providers in Africa — was founded in Nigeria in 2001 by Issam Darwish and William Saad.  The physical infrastructure through which Nigerian mobile communications flow is substantially controlled by another Lebanese-origin enterprise.
The Boulos family’s SCOA Nigeria distributes vehicles and heavy machinery across the country. The El-Khalils built the transport backbone. The Chagourys built the ports and now the highways. The Moussallis own the airwaves.
These families do not merely operate in Nigeria.
They operate Nigeria.
THE HAITI LESSON
I want every Nigerian reading this to understand what happened in Haiti — because it is not a distant tragedy. It is a precise warning.
Pierre Réginald Boulos — a man of Lebanese and Syrian descent — was one of Haiti’s richest and most powerful businessmen. He built his empire through supermarkets and car dealerships. He ran for president. He called gang leaders “community leaders” and funded social activities in neighbourhoods they controlled. 
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security eventually arrested him, determining he had “engaged in a campaign of violence and gang support that contributed to Haiti’s destabilization.” 
An immigration judge issued a deportation order against him in April 2026. 
Haiti is a failed state. Its capital is controlled by gangs. Its government exists in name only. Its people flee by sea.
And at the documented centre of its collapse — according to the United States government — was a Lebanese-origin oligarch who controlled the economy, cultivated presidential relationships, and used armed networks when it served his interests.
I am not saying Nigeria is Haiti today.
I am saying that Haiti was not always Haiti either.
It became Haiti across decades of elite capture — a foreign-origin commercial class that controlled the economy, financed the politics, dominated the media, and systematically hollowed out the state until there was nothing left for ordinary Haitians to appeal to.
Nigeria is on that road. The destination is visible. The question is whether we have the courage to turn back before we arrive.
THE COLONIAL CONCESSION SYSTEM — REBUILT
There is a phrase that describes what we are watching: the colonial concession system — rebuilt through private networks instead of European flags.
Nigeria’s colonial masters did exactly this. They awarded the country’s most strategic assets — trade routes, ports, commodity extraction — to foreign interests in exchange for political loyalty and personal enrichment. The colonised nation’s resources flowed outward. Accountability flowed nowhere.
What is the Lagos-Calabar highway but a modern colonial concession — Nigeria’s entire coastal corridor handed to a Lebanese conglomerate, funded by Nigerian public debt, with no competitive process, for the benefit of a man who cannot enter America because of terrorism concerns?
What is a 45-year Snake Island port concession but the recreation of a colonial trading post — a Lebanese family controlling the maritime gateway of Lagos for the next half century, across multiple Nigerian generations, regardless of who wins any election?
When foreign-connected billionaires become presidential “confidants”… when their children share offshore companies with the president’s son… when contracts worth ₦20 trillion flow without bidding to a single family’s conglomerate… when the nation’s second-highest honour is whispered to a convict in secret… citizens are not merely entitled to ask questions.
They are obligated to.
MY PERSONAL POSITION
Let me be absolutely direct.
I am aware that the Chagoury family shared social relationships with members of Nigeria’s establishment over the decades — including, at various points, people my father knew.
I do not care.
My father Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree QC — Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General, the United Nations’ first African Under-Secretary-General — spent his life serving Nigeria and the world. He fought in a Lagos courtroom to stop Lebanese commercial interests from overriding Nigerian law inside a Nigerian company. He was right then.
His son is telling you the same thing now, at a scale and a stakes level that would have alarmed even him.
Friendship is not a license for state capture. Shared history is not a justification for stripping a nation of its infrastructure budget. The fact that families once broke bread together does not make ₦20 trillion in no-bid contracts acceptable.
It makes it more dangerous — because it shows how personal relationships are being weaponised to bypass every institutional safeguard that exists to protect ordinary Nigerians from exactly this kind of arrangement.
Nigeria is not a business to be managed by Lebanese billionaires from Paris.
It is not a concession to be allocated without bidding to friends of the presidency.
It is not Haiti — not yet.
But it will become Haiti if Nigerians do not wake up, stand up, and demand — loudly, urgently, and without apology — that their country be governed for their benefit.
Not for Chagoury’s.
Not for Boulos’s.
Not for the El-Khalils’.
For ours.
Kio Amachree
Stockholm, Sweden
President, Worldview International
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE 
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