 Again, court papers in relation to APC's presidential candidate Bala Tinibu's antecedents in the United States and some issues in his past resurfaces, raising many questions. And obedience are a threat to the PDP, not ABCA, a number of state Governor Charles Saludo says. This is PlusPolitics, I am Mary Anacoff. Ten accounts have been linked to the all-progressive Congress APC's presidential candidate Bala Tinibu by the United States authorities in the early 90s and $460,000 were deducted from one of the accounts as tax on investment domiciled in U.S. banks. This was the submission of the Chief Spokesperson for the Tinibu-Shatima Presidential Campaign Council, Festus Kiamu, in an interview on the controversy surrounding the alleged involvement of Bala Tinibu in narcotics and money laundering about 30 years ago. A few days ago, a documentary about Bala Tinibu and his alleged involvement in drug trafficking and money laundering in Chicago was released by a Nigerian investigative journalist, David Houdain. Well, joining us to discuss this is David Houdain, he is an independent investigative journalist. So good to have you join us, David. David. Good to have you. Great, great, great. It's good to have you join us. I think we're just going to skip straight to it. So for the benefit of those who have not necessarily seen this documentary or had the opportunity to read into some of those documents that you have put out on your social media, what's the centipest of this story and why are you so interested in it? So this is a story about a federal case which was investigated in the U.S. in 1992 and had at its core a drug kingpin in a town in a city called Gary, Indiana by the name of the Edwards. Now, when this fellow was taken down and given lifetime imprisonment as part of the investigation, his source, his heroin source was identified as a Nigerian drug dealer called Abyo-Dohat Wele, who was working for another Nigerian drug dealer called Muiz, I think Muigah, Condé. And in the process of unraveling how they ran their business transporting heroin from Nigeria to Chicago enroute Indiana, how the money was moved, then a certain Bola-Ametinu move was brought into the picture by the investigating agencies which were the IRS and the FBI now. It was determined that some of Bola-Ametinu's accounts were being used to essentially move money around on behalf of these drug dealers. And more than that, the actual address that was used to open at least one of these accounts was the same address that belonged to the house that was used by these drug dealers as the heroin pick-up and drop-off points. And even more to the point that Bola-Ametinu's wife, Bola-Ametinu, who actually at a point opened a joint account with Obrea Condé, who was the wife of one of these drug dealers. So it would appear that these people were sort of joined at the hip. Now from the point of view of the investigating agent Kevin Moss of the IRS, what was the real smoking gun at the time was the share quantum of money that was discovered in some of Bola-Ametinu's accounts. Now why the money was a red flag was that according to Timbu's own submissions on a credit application which he had filled in a few weeks before the investigation began, he declared his total monthly income as $2,400 and he had no other source of income. So someone with an annual income of roughly $28,800 being discovered with about $1.4 million in his bank account that he couldn't explain, that for obvious reasons was a money laundering red flag in itself. And if you read the documents, the investigating agent stated that he had probable cause to believe that these funds were in fact the proceeds of, I quote, narcotics trafficking. Now also in these documents, the agents reached out to Bola-Ametinu who was in Nigeria by this time, preparing to run for senator in Lagos West 1992. When he reached out to Bola-Ametinu over the telephone, Timbu actually admitted that he was very familiar with Muizadigwega Akande and with Abildo Aguile and that on several occasions he had paid sums into his accounts that came from them. Only for him to make an about face a few days later and then claim to the same agent that he didn't know these people. So if you dig further into these documents and I would sort of recommend that anyone who is watching this shouldn't necessarily just take my word for it or take what anybody else is saying about it, for you should actually find those documents because they are in the public domain now. It takes a bit of time, but just sit down and read through those documents because it's actually not that difficult to sort of establish a timeline of what happened now. This wasn't in the documents, but I was able to dig this out on my own, the process of researching the story. About 10 days after first contact was established between Kevin Moss and Bola-Ametinu, but bear in mind that at this time his accounts were getting frozen all over the place because the US authorities believed that the money in those accounts was the proceeds of heroin trafficking. Bola-Ametinu then proceeded to start spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on real estate just days after he became aware that the US authorities had an investigatory interest in him, which obviously raises the question that first of all, where did these funds come from? And more importantly, what was the purpose of parking this money in real estate? Was he trying to hide money from the feds after becoming aware that they were coming after him? These questions have never been asked before because some of these issues haven't even been made public before. I believe it was when I did the story in July that it emerged for the first time the shared scale of real estate investments that he embarked on shortly after he became aware that the feds were coming after him. Millions of dollars were spent buying real estate in the US and in the UK. And all this for someone who claimed that he had been claimed out by the Abacha regime that he had no money, that he was essentially poor and broke and that he had made his, he claimed that he had made his initial big sum of money, some of 850,000 dollars from a bonus payment while working as an accountant at the audit firm Deloitte Antush, which for anyone who has any knowledge of how corporate consulting works or who has worked in the big four, you would know instantly that that categorically is not true because nobody makes that kind of money in the big four. Not associates, not partners, not equity partners, nobody makes that kind of money. So clearly he was being less than honest. So what has sort of taken this story or elevated this story to another level most recently now is that some people, myself included. So people working in the media and in the civil society space decided to sort of take it a step further and actually carry out some more in depth investigation to try to establish exactly who this person is and what kind of background that this person comes from. And in the course of doing this, one of the things that was done was hiring a private investigator in Chicago to actually find out whether his claims of having worked at Deloitte and at Arthur Anderson were true and his claims of having gone to Richard J. Daly College and Chicago State University were true. And so this private investigator retained a lawyer in the Chicago area. The lawyer was filed a subpoena and successfully subpoenaed four different institutions. So Deloitte LLP was subpoenaed, Arthur Anderson was subpoenaed, Richard Daly College, which he claims to have attended in the mid-seventies was subpoenaed and Chicago State University was also subpoenaed to try to find out what exactly all these institutions know about this guy. The reply from Deloitte so far was probably the most damning of all the replies that came back. Deloitte basically said that you might have seen this flying around on social media. I published it on my Twitter page yesterday. The reply basically said, we do not know this person. We have no record of this person. He has never worked with us. So essentially you have a presidential candidate who potentially has committed perjury because bear in mind that this claim of having worked at Deloitte is something which was repeated on his INEC EC9 declaration form. So potentially there's an issue of perjury there which raises the question with INEC potentially about this person's suitability or the legal basis for this person being even allowed to run for office at all. And obviously it also raises the question of a potential criminal prosecution which is being pursued separately by an independent lawyer. I'm so sorry, let me just come in there. I'm sure that you saw that interview. Kershersky and of course the Tinnable Company has insisted that no crime had been committed from what you put together the whole documentary. A couple of us have seen it over and over again and they're saying that look, this is also backed by the US Consulate's message. Kayama is actually saying that that for feature, the money that you made reference to in your documentary was just for tax. Right, so what Kayama would need to explain to us is how it is that an accountant who by his own admission was making $28,800 a year, somehow had a back tax burden of close to half a million dollars. Because clearly there's an arithmetic problem that the maths are not adding up. So if Kayama wants to insult people's intelligence, he has to tell smarter lies than that. You cannot tell me that an accountant making $28,000 a year was going taxes that equivalently roughly 16 years of his aggregate salaries, that does not make any sense. So Festus Kayama categorically was lying as Festus Kayama tends to do. And just as an auxiliary point to that, it should also be noted that the documents in question are not in any way ambiguous when stating what the source of the funds was and what the purpose of the seizure was. It's written in black and white on the first page of the court documents. It stated there that seizure related to proceeds of narcotics trafficking. Right, it's stated in black and white. So what people like Festus Kayama are banking on is that most people simply will not read these documents by themselves and will simply go off of what they heard. So if obviously maybe you have a liking for a particular candidate that Festus Kayama is working for. And you hear Festus Kayama say that, no, everything is fine, so it's just tax. Then you just reflexively adopt that position. He doesn't expect you to have the mental rigour to actually go read this thing for yourself and see what it actually says. Which is why as I keep on, as I've said to the point of irritation, I think over the course of the past few weeks, people need to actually just download these documents and read it. It's in a public domain, just read it. And when you read these things, and it's written in plain English, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand what it says. When you read these things, you take away the power of people like Kayama to mislead you, as a result, your intelligence. Again, let me go back to what Festus had said in a recent interview with Shayo, I'd like to just go directly. He's saying, he's insisting that this is not a fresh case. This is, I mean, he's also making a case that if he was to be convicted, then he would have been serving a jail time. But then you mentioned something about a plea bargain in that documentary. You talked to also about a 5% of most of these people who the feds allowed to go, who are let off the hook if they take a plea bargain. But some people, for my understanding, if there is a plea bargain, then there is a reduced sentence of sorts or an agreement. It's either you're going to be ratting on somebody or you're getting a lower number of years of conviction. So he's saying there was no conviction. So there is no case. Which, again, is what a very disingenuous person would say. Saying that there's no conviction is not the same thing as saying that there is no case, right? Because there are several ways of resolving a case under the US justice system. As was mentioned in the documentary, the US Justice Department itself under its own guidelines states very clearly that settlements are encouraged in situations where justice will be served. So in other words, to conserve the resources of the US government, it is often the case that plea bargain settlements, things like that are used to resolve cases. So it's not everything that is taken to criminal trial. And bear in mind that the Tinnable trial or the legal process that brought Tinnable into this whole Lee Andrew Edwards mess. The actual centerpiece of this trial wasn't actually what I mentioned. It was Lee Andrew Edwards who was the spearhead who was the kingpin of the heroin trade in Gary, Indiana. Where Tinnable came into it was by being identified as the money laundering the accountant working for the drug cartel. Which makes him just as culpable, but he wasn't the central figure. So from the point of view of the prosecuting agencies, it's more expedient to juice this fellow for what information he can give you than trying to pursue a material conviction against him because he might not even be that useful to you. The most useful people to you in that situation are the actual drug dealers who actually do the actual trafficking on a day to day basis. They are the ones who know where all the bodies are buried, both literally and figuratively. This is a money laundering who is useful but in a different way. So it makes perfect sense that they were more interested in probably getting what information they can get out of him as against trying to pursue a material conviction. And by the way, all of this is written very clearly in the case files. Again, I can't stress how important it is for people to actually read these case files because there is this sort of like you've seen that people like Femi Fanikaya, there are people like Festus Keamu, come out like one after the other over the past week in this competition for who can misinterpret what is written in black and white in a more disingenuous way. And I just think that the antidote to this thing is for people to actually read what is called documents in black and white. So that it's not what Keamu said, Festus, what Mundane said because that doesn't help anybody. People really need to read these documents, right? That when you see that it is stated in black and white that I, special agent Kevin Moss, have probable cause to believe that the funds contained in accounts belonging to Polar and Medtionable at first heritage bank, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah represent the proceeds of narcotics trafficking. It's there in black and white. There's no argument to be had. So people like Keamu are trying to create the impression that somehow this, the existence of this case is being misunderstood. It's being misinterpreted. Oh, it's something to do with tax. And if not to explain how the song ends when $8,000 a year was going tax, taxes of half a million dollars a year. And when that defense fails, they say, oh, well, it wasn't really a conviction. Yes, technically it wasn't a conviction, but it was an indictment though. So let me just quickly close with this, right? And this was an illustration that I used elsewhere when I had a conversation like this earlier this morning. Now, I likened it to buying a car from a car dealer, right? I buy a Honda Accord from a car dealer and then someone writes a letter to the car dealer asking the car dealer that, did I buy a Mercedes Benz from the car dealer? The car dealer replies that, no, I didn't buy Mercedes Benz from him. And then this person goes around and says, yes, this letter is proof that I didn't buy a car from him. That is what people like Keamu are doing. I paraded this opposite letter from the US consulates saying that there was no criminal conviction. Yes, there was no criminal conviction. There was a criminal indictment though. Okay. Let me quickly bring you to another thing that I saw that stuck out for me. There was a mention of the late MKO Abhiola in that documentary in the whole laundering issue. Why are you in any way insinuating that he had something to do with drugs? I mean, he's no longer here, but of course one of his sons is running for presidency. What does that even mean? Explain to the average Nigerian who says this guy as a democracy hero and you're here telling us that he seems to have been entangled in some drug business. Well, again, it's not me saying anything. It's not me telling anybody anything, right? Because what was stated there was very clear and obvious. The sources that were cited are there for anyone to cross check with. So for example, Professor Gary Bush who is a well-known African policy analyst and a professor of African studies at the University of Hawaii who has extensive knowledge of Nigeria and the West African sub-region in the 80s and the 90s. He was one of my primary resource persons. And in fact, that entire part of the documentary was essentially based on indirect codes from him. So if anyone is displeased with the characterization of M.K. Abdullah as someone who potentially could have been involved in the drug trade, I don't think it's me they need to have a problem with because I think the sources are accessible. So maybe they need to go meet Professor Gary Bush and have a word with him or ask him what he knows because I spoke to him several times to the person who's putting the story together and the documentary. And he was very positive. He stated very clearly that this person was involved in international drug trafficking and that the US and UK authorities were in the know and that was the material reason why they were not that bothered about the fact that he ended up spending five years in prison and then he died unjustly because they were more concerned with him not becoming president to begin with. So that's not something I came up with. That's what the resource persons I will mention in the documentary came up with. So if anyone has a problem with history, then that's not my fault unfortunately. Something people need to understand is that bad things have happened in Nigeria and a lot of people that we have been raised to think of as heroes are not actually heroes, right? And it's, I think it's one of the growing pains that people have to deal with. I personally, I on a personal level I've had to deal with that several times while researching stories and I find out things about people that I didn't know before. So when I find out, when I found out for example some years back that someone I once really looked up to was his name, the former attorney general of federation, the guy who was murdered under the Abbasan Joe administration, like his name skips me now, Bolaike. Yes, that there was a time that he didn't cover himself with glory either. Shortly after Tulumu came into office in 1999 and he was sued because there were all these controversies around him surrounding this same drugs case surrounding his perjury on his I-NEC form because he has been telling lies about what schools he attended and what jobs he has had for decades now. And Bolaike whom I thought of as a, you know as a personal hero or whatever was one of the people who was rubbernecking on behalf of this fellow and sort of twisting the law into pretzels to try and, you know regal this person out of, you know what he should have faced. So that's just the reality. Some people we think of as heroes weren't actually that and that's not my fault. So people shouldn't attack the messenger. People should rather be more concerned about whether the message is true or not. And that brings me to my other question because there are people who like the likes of FFK and in the Tinibu camp who say this is just cheap blackmail. It's just that some of them think that you have been sponsored by the opposition and the opposition here being the PDP and the Labour Party. But then I'm also questioning why you're so invested in this even though you're saying that yes we need to know who the people who we hail as champions but to what end is this documentary coming out and many would say that you have a special leaning and a liking to the presidential candidates of the Labour Party and this is why you're doing this if you did not necessarily have that leaning would you still go ahead with this? So I mean nine months ago the Labour Party as we know it probably didn't even exist. The person who is the candidate of Labour Party now we probably didn't even know nine months ago whether it was gonna be running for president at all. But the story question which I published in July has been in production since January. So when people make comments like that I feel as if maybe it's because they don't understand all my work processes and maybe they also don't understand what my motivations are. So there's this sort of very illiterate idea that everybody in Nigeria is the same. Everybody in Nigeria is motivated by the same things. So if someone is very obviously motivated to achieve something that must mean that someone somewhere is sponsoring him or there is some inducement somewhere there's something in it for them. The idea of doing something for purely ideological reasons almost like it doesn't exist in Nigeria. But unfortunately, well people need to get used to the fact that people are not everybody in Nigeria has to say, right? People are different, right? I work for ideological purposes. So for example, some of my close friends are always surprised when they find out for example that despite the fact that obviously my publication is a reader supported publication. People can pay for subscriptions and things like that. So there's a bit of revenue from that. But apart from that, it's basically completely unfunded and I fund my own work myself. I have a nine to five journalism is something I basically do on the site. People are always shocked to find that out. Why on earth would you go through all of this when you're not really getting anything out of it? I'm really curious because you had a retainer or a lawyer. You had an investigative, you had a private investigator. You went through all of that trouble. It couldn't have been for just a penny. It cost a lot. Who funded it? Oh no, so how did you get the funding? The retaining of the lawyer and the private investigator that wasn't actually me. So that's the independent lawyer that I reference whom I'm working with. So he was the one who carried all that load, right? So I just happened to be alone. And why was he so invested in it? He's not Nigerian. He's not going to be voting in this election. He's a private lawyer. So why was he carrying all of the buy-in? The lawyer behind it is a Nigerian. So the lawyer he hired is an American. But the person, the independent lawyer, his name is Mike Enahore, but he's based in the FCT. So he's actually the one who's fighting the independent legal action that potentially will challenge Tinibu's candidacy because seeing as Tinibu committed perjury. I just happened to be lucky enough to have a front row seat, to be the media person who had access to be able to get hold of the documents as they were coming through. That wasn't actually my work. So I hope that that's clear that up. But over and away from that, just with respect to why I work, the way I do, people really need to come to terms with the idea that there are certain people that exist who just have ideological beliefs and are willing to, you know, watch the world burn for the sake of those beliefs. And I'm one of those people, I've said it jokingly before, half jokingly that I have the mind of a suicide bomber because that's just the reality. I feel as if at this point in time, really as a Nigerian who has been through some of the things we've been through over the past seven years, if you still feel as if you have something to lose, then I question your basic intelligence. In my case, for example, my entire life as I knew it is gone. Home has been taken away from me. I can't go back to Nigeria anytime soon. I live in exile. I live under asylum protection. Managerial passport isn't useful to me anymore. I can't even travel with managerial passport. Thankfully I have another passport here. My entire life as I knew it has been ended because people made a certain electoral decision in 2015 that I was not partied to and I did not agree with. So how can I watch the same thing playing out again in front of me and not do anything about it when the power to at least providing information to a large audience, which is the single power that I have. It's something that I can do. So this is personal for you. It's not necessarily about Nigeria. It's personal to you. It is about Nigeria, but it is also personal. It is also very, very personal. Absolutely personal. Are we supposed to be expecting more of this because you also raised, you know, a question mark in that documentary about, you know, the antecedents of the man Bola met Tinibu, nobody knowing where he came from, his real name before he became who he is today. And of course she talks about him adopting a name from his adoptive parents, et cetera, et cetera. Are we going to see more of these exposés? Are you going to take on another on another presidential candidate? Is this something that would go around all of the presidential candidates? Or again, are you going to give the people, the naysayers, a reason to say, well, this was just an agenda, like you just admitted to a personal one against a particular presidential candidate? Well, to be honest, the quote unquote naysayers, if they have a problem with any of the work that I do, they are free to do their own work. Like I'm a firm believer in the sky being big enough for everyone to do what exactly it is that they want to do. So if anyone has a problem with the kind of journalism that I do or the way that I practice it, they are free to show their own method of doing it and show me how mine is wrong, basically. So I'm not really somebody who takes much stock in what people say or I'm not saying about my work. It's not important to me. I'm doing it because I want to do it. That's the only thing that is important to me. And as to whether this is going to be extended to the other candidates, well, the correct question to ask is, do the other candidates have this kind of scandals hanging around them? Do the other candidates have prior involvement? Are they simply, as opposed to other candidates have the other candidates committed burgery on the INEC forms? If these questions are true, or if the answer to these questions is yes, then yes, sure. Then the other candidates will get the same treatment. If they haven't done these things and only one candidate has done these things, well, there isn't going to be equivalency and that's not my fault. That's that candidate's fault. That's Bola Mettinibu's fault. Okay, finally, before I let you go, what are your thoughts concerning the 2023 elections? A lot of people are excited about the different momentum that we see on social media, whether it be the obedience, whether it be the articulate, whatever it is, the conquistillas, all of them. But then we're looking at young people taking the forefront of this electoral process. Do we see a sustainance of that momentum till 2023? And are you optimistic or maybe rather pessimistic as to what the outcome would be? I have to be optimistic because if I wasn't, then why would I even bother? I have to be optimistic, especially coming off the backdrop of what we all experienced in 2020, for example, where young people have one demand. This wasn't even a political demand. This wasn't an electoral movement or anything. It was just a very simple request that please stop killing us in the streets like dogs. Please stop raping us. Please stop kidnapping us. Stop using uniform people to oppress us. And we saw what this administration and the ruling party did to us. So I feel like the memories of that period haven't gone anywhere. I certainly haven't forgotten. And I feel like the way the youth population was galvanized at that point in time, maybe the government itself didn't realize what it was doing. Maybe the administration didn't realize that it was sowing the seeds for its own eventual evisceration because that's what I believe is happening. If this election were to hold today and if this were a free and fair election, a genuinely free and fair election, I think it's fair to say that the ruling party wouldn't stand a chance. But then again, it's Nigeria. So is it going to be a free and fair election? We do not know that. We hope it is. But if we're going by precedent, there's a very good chance that it will not be. So we have to wait and see. But yes, I am optimistic. I have to be optimistic. If we don't have hope, then what's the point of anything? Well, I want to say thank you. David Hunde is an independent investigative journalist and he has put out a documentary called Drug Lord from Drug Lord to Presidential Candidate. And it's all about the presidential candidates of the all-progressive Congress. Thank you so much, David, for being here. Thank you for having me. All right. And we'll take a quick break when we return. We'll be moving our attention to, of course, a number of state governor and the presidential candidates of the Labour Party and his article on Pete Orbeez. Stay with us.