Gabriel 🐐

[Sahara Reporters @SaharaReporters]

WATCH: Islamic Cleric Jingir Says Muslim-Muslim Ticket Proves Muslims Outnumber Christians In Nigeria, Urges Muslims To ‘Show Infidels Their Limit’

More on SaharaTV: https://t.co/mDF0Dn4rMp

[West Africa Weekly @WestAfricaWeek]

Nigeria now has 7,200 millionaires and three billionaires, making it Africa's fourth-largest hub for millionaires. But 61 percent of Nigerians live below the poverty line, and 33 percent cannot afford food. Under Tinubu, his billionaire friends receive trillions in government contracts, national honours, and public praise, while 30 million more Nigerians have fallen into poverty. This is not a coincidence. This is a system designed to enrich the few while the masses starve.

[ARISE NEWS @ARISEtv]

Nigeria Cannot Afford the Lagos-Calabar Highway; I Don’t Think the Road Will Go Beyond Epe – Duke

There is already a road from Lagos to Calabar; if the road is poor, fix it. There are some expenditures we make that do not reflect the realities of our circumstances. The amount spent on that road could be better spent providing electricity or upgrading the healthcare system.

Donald Duke, Presidential Candidate, People’s Redemption Party

[ARISE NEWS @ARISEtv]

Delta Cleric Slams APC Election Rice + Debate Over ‘Renewed Hope’ Smartphones

A Warri-based priest criticised the Renewed Hope strategy of distributing bags of rice, calling it irresponsible.

The controversy widened with reports of brand-new, branded ‘Renewed Hope’ smartphones being distributed as part of a door-to-door movement.

@anieosakwe

[Kio Amachree @Ivory1957]

THE GUESTS WHO BECAME THE LANDLORDS

Letters from Stockholm

By Kio Amachree

In April 2020, a man in Beirut posted a photograph on a Lebanese buy-and-sell page, the sort of forum where people trade second-hand fridges and winter coats. The item for sale was a Nigerian woman. Thirty years old. Full legal papers. Active and very clean. The asking price was one thousand United States dollars. Human Rights Watch recorded the case. The Lebanese authorities eventually arrested the man, but only after Nigerians made a noise loud enough to be heard across the Mediterranean.

Now hold that image in your mind and turn to the other ledger. On the eighth of January this year, the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria conferred the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger, the nation's second-highest honour, ordinarily reserved for Vice Presidents, Senate Presidents and Chief Justices, on Gilbert Ramez Chagoury. Weeks later the Federal Executive Council approved one point seven trillion naira, roughly one point two four billion dollars, for a section of the Sokoto-Badagry superhighway, and handed it to Hitech Construction, a Chagoury Group company.

One thousand dollars for a Nigerian woman in Beirut. One point two billion dollars for a Lebanese contractor in Abuja. That is the exchange rate of our humiliation, and it is time somebody wrote it down plainly.

Let me be precise about what this piece is and is not. There have been Lebanese families in West Africa since the eighteen-sixties, when men fleeing Ottoman conscription and the collapse of the Mount Lebanon silk economy stepped off ships at Dakar, Freetown, Conakry and Lagos. Most of them traded honestly. They built shops, then warehouses, then factories. Many are third and fourth generation Nigerians who have never seen Beirut. They are not the subject of this article. The subject is a small, identifiable, documented network of families who converted commercial position into political capture, and the Nigerian officials who sold them the keys.

Because that is the part we must never lose sight of. No foreigner captured Nigeria. Nigerians handed Nigeria over.

THE CHAGOURY FILE

The record is not contested and it is not obscure. Gilbert Chagoury was born in Lagos in 1946 to Lebanese parents and founded the Chagoury Group with his brother Ronald in 1971. Under General Sani Abacha he became something closer to a minister without portfolio than a contractor. In 2000, a Geneva court convicted him of money laundering and aiding a criminal organisation in connection with accounts at a Geneva bank through which more than one hundred and twenty million dollars flowed from Nigeria's central bank to entities linked to the Abacha family. He was fined and forfeited some sixty-six million dollars. He also entered a plea in a United States federal court to conspiracy to launder money tied to Abacha-looted funds. In Nigeria, he secured immunity from prosecution by returning money he held in Swiss accounts. Nuhu Ribadu, in the Obasanjo years, has described how the man's private jet lifted off before the EFCC could reach him.

Nineteen years later, in 2019, Chagoury entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the United States Attorney's Office in which he admitted providing approximately one hundred and eighty thousand dollars used to make illegal contributions to four American political candidates through straw donors. He paid a one point eight million dollar fine and agreed to cooperate. A sitting congressman, Jeff Fortenberry, was convicted of lying to federal investigators about thirty thousand dollars of that money and resigned from Congress.

Read that sentence again and let it settle. An American congressman lost his seat and his liberty over Chagoury money. In Nigeria, Chagoury received a national honour.

And then the contracts. The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, seven hundred kilometres, estimated at between eleven and thirteen billion dollars, awarded in its entirety to Hitech Construction with no competitive tender. The Minister of Works, Dave Umahi, explained the absence of public bidding by reference to the company's track record. In early 2025, ITB Nigeria, another Chagoury subsidiary, was selected to refurbish the Tin Can and Apapa ports, a contract reported at between seven hundred million and eight hundred and three million dollars. In March 2026, ITB won the construction contract on the one billion dollar Snake Island port concession. Then Sokoto-Badagry.

The connective tissue is family. Leaked corporate records reviewed by the ICIJ and reported by OCCRP show that Seyi Tinubu, the President's son, was a majority shareholder in a British Virgin Islands company alongside Ronald Chagoury Junior. Seyi Tinubu also sits on the board of CDK Integrated Industries, a Chagoury company. The government insists the relationship played no part in the awards.

Abroad, the same man is Saint Lucia's Ambassador to the Holy See, a former economic adviser to President Kérékou of Benin, a gallery donor at the Louvre, a major benefactor of the Clinton Foundation and of the Lebanese American University, where a medical school carries his name. He has bought respectability in three continents with money that began its life in the Central Bank of Nigeria.

THE BOULOS FILE

Massad Fares Boulos was born in Batroun in Lebanon and holds four citizenships: Lebanese, American, French and Nigerian. In 1996 he was installed as chief executive of SCOA Nigeria PLC, a truck and heavy machinery dealership, by his father-in-law Michel Zouhair Fadoul, patriarch of the Fadoul Group, founded in Burkina Faso in 1966 and now spanning more than a hundred companies across a dozen countries. In 2022 his son Michael married Tiffany Trump at Mar-a-Lago. In December 2024 he was named senior adviser to the President of the United States on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, and in April 2025 the State Department added Africa to his portfolio, making a Nigerian passport holder and Lagos truck dealer the most senior American official working the entire continent.

No court has convicted Massad Boulos of anything, and I make no such allegation. What I raise is the question of interest, and it is a fair one. When the New York Times examined the billionaire billing, it found SCOA trading at about two naira a share, a market capitalisation in the region of eight hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars, and profits for one recent year of a few thousand dollars. Boulos told the paper that most of the family wealth came through his wife. His own company's public defence, issued after his appointment, lists the Chagoury Group among its major clients and states that Hitech Construction depends significantly on SCOA for construction machinery.

So the man advising Washington on Nigeria has a thirty-year commercial relationship with the family holding thirteen billion dollars of untendered Nigerian contracts. In October 2025 he stood up in Rome and told journalists that claims of targeted religious persecution in Nigeria were misguided and inconsistent with realities on the ground, and praised the Tinubu government's security measures. Thirteen days later his own President designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern and instructed the Pentagon to prepare for possible military action. By July 2026 Boulos had reversed himself, calling the violence against Middle Belt Christian communities intolerable.

Whatever one thinks of Washington's threats against our sovereignty, and I have written at length about what AFRICOM's growing appetite for Africa means for us, this much is intolerable in a different sense: our security, our sovereignty and our dead are being mediated by a man whose commercial life is entangled with the contractors of the government he was assessing. Freedom of information requests seeking his ethics disclosures have gone unanswered for months.

THE SECURITY FILE

Now the part our government prefers not to discuss.

On the sixteenth of May 2013 the DSS arrested Mustapha Fawaz, co-owner of the Amigo Supermarket and Wonderland Amusement Park in Abuja. What followed was the interception at Kano airport of a Lebanese national carrying sixty thousand undeclared American dollars en route to Beirut, and then the discovery, at Number 3 Gaya Road, Bompai, Kano, of a concrete bunker beneath a private residence containing anti-tank weapons, landmines, rocket-propelled grenades, automatic rifles and more than eleven thousand rounds of ammunition. The DSS stated publicly that the arsenal belonged to Hezbollah and was intended for attacks on Israeli and Western interests in Nigeria.

And what did the Federal Republic do with this? The trial judge struck out the terrorism charges, observing that Hezbollah is not a proscribed terrorist organisation in Nigeria. Fawaz and Abdallah Tahini were acquitted. Talal Roda was sentenced to life for the arms offences, and in January 2015 the Supreme Court set even that aside, holding that the case should have been tried in the Kano division of the Federal High Court.

Weapons of war under a house in Kano, and nobody is serving a day.

The United States Treasury was less relaxed. In 2015 OFAC designated the Fawaz brothers, stating that Mustapha Fawaz had since the 1990s conducted communications, surveillance and reporting activity for Hezbollah from Abuja, that a warrant was outstanding for his brother Fouzi following the Kano discovery, and that Abdallah Tahini was a Hezbollah veteran, long-term fundraiser and permanent representative of the organisation's Foreign Relations Department in Abuja.

This is not a Nigerian curiosity. It is a regional architecture. On Christmas Day 2003, UTA flight 141 crashed on takeoff from Cotonou bound for Beirut, killing one hundred and forty-one people; Arab press accounts reported that a Hezbollah foreign relations official for Africa and two aides were aboard carrying two million dollars raised from Lebanese businessmen in Africa. In 2013 Treasury designated four Lebanese nationals running Hezbollah's affairs in Sierra Leone, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire and the Gambia. In 2022 it designated Ali Saade and Ibrahim Taher in Guinea, finding that Taher used his status as Honorary Consul of Lebanon to Côte d'Ivoire to move through Conakry unscrutinised while dollars went out through the airport in luggage past bribed customs officers. Kassim Tajideen, designated in 2009, was jailed in Washington in 2019 after admitting a conspiracy involving over fifty million dollars in prohibited transactions and the movement of as much as one billion dollars through the American financial system. He served one year of five and went home to Beirut.

None of it began yesterday. A declassified CIA assessment of 1988 described how Siaka Stevens turned a blind eye to Jamil Sahid Mohammed's activities in return for his services, allowing one man effectively unchecked control of Sierra Leone's diamond and fishing industries. Nabih Berri, who has presided over the Lebanese Parliament for more than three decades, was born in Freetown. The Sierra Leonean model, a foreign merchant financing a Big Man who protects him from the law, is the model that was later exported wholesale to Lagos and Abuja.

THE MIRROR

Here is where it becomes unbearable.

Human Rights Watch describes Lebanon's kafala system as trapping tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers, most of them African and Asian women, in conditions amounting at worst to modern slavery. Article 7 of the Lebanese Labour Law expressly excludes domestic workers from the protections other workers enjoy: no minimum wage, no limits on hours, no weekly rest, no overtime, no freedom of association. Their legal existence is tied to a sponsor who may terminate it. When Lebanon's economy collapsed, employers dumped African women outside their embassies without passports, money or tickets. Wages are openly graded by nationality and by skin colour, with African women at the bottom of the scale. In 2020 a Nigerian woman, Temitope, was filmed with a bloodied mouth after her employer struck her. She had refused his advances.

So let us state the position with the clarity it deserves. A Nigerian woman in Beirut cannot own land, cannot own a business outright, cannot change employer without permission, cannot claim the protection of the labour law, and in the worst cases cannot leave the building. A Lebanese businessman in Abuja can hold a Nigerian passport, own the ports, build the coastline, seat his son beside the President's son in an offshore company, receive the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger and, when weapons of war are found in his community's basement, watch the charges evaporate.

Reciprocity is not racism. Reciprocity is the minimum condition of a sovereign state.

WHAT MUST HAPPEN

First, name the disease correctly. This is not a Lebanese problem. It is a Nigerian problem with Lebanese beneficiaries. Every naira of those untendered contracts was signed by a Nigerian hand. Every immunity deal was granted by a Nigerian government. Every acquittal was entered in a Nigerian court. Every honour was conferred by a Nigerian President. If we permit this to curdle into a xenophobic campaign against shopkeepers in Kano and Aba, we will have let the guilty escape once again behind a crowd of the innocent, which is precisely what they are counting on.

Second, proscribe. Hezbollah is a designated terrorist organisation in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and across the Gulf. A Nigerian judge was able to dismiss terrorism charges in 2013 because it is not one here. That is a legislative failure, and the National Assembly can cure it in a fortnight if it wishes to.

Third, publish. Nigeria maintains a beneficial ownership register. It should be enforced without exception, and every federal contract above a set threshold should carry the ultimate beneficial owners on its face, together with the tender documents or the written justification for their absence.

Fourth, audit. The Bureau of Public Procurement should be compelled to lay before the National Assembly the complete file on Lagos-Calabar, Tin Can and Apapa, Snake Island and Sokoto-Badagry. Not a summary. The file.

Fifth, reciprocate. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should open a formal dialogue with Beirut on the treatment of Nigerian nationals under the kafala system, and should make clear that the commercial privileges enjoyed by Lebanese nationals in Nigeria cannot indefinitely survive the conditions endured by Nigerians in Lebanon. That is not a threat. It is diplomacy as every other self-respecting country practises it.

Sixth, insist that the United States answer the ethics question about its own Africa adviser. A Nigerian passport holder with three decades of commercial entanglement in Lagos is currently the most senior American official on this continent. Abuja is entitled to ask what disclosures were made and what waivers were granted. It will not ask, because it is compromised. So we must ask, from outside, in public, on the record.

I have spent a great deal of my life defending the proposition that Nigeria's institutions were once built on merit, because I watched my father help build them. Nigeria's first Solicitor-General did not draft immunity deals for money launderers. The men who negotiated our independence at Lancaster House did not imagine a Republic that would sell its coastline without a tender.

We were told these people came as guests. Guests do not hold the deeds. Guests do not get the second-highest honour of the Republic while a woman from Ogun State is advertised on Facebook for a thousand dollars. Sixty-five years after the flag went up, we are still renting out the house and sleeping in the yard, and we have nobody to blame for it but the men we elected to hold the keys.

Kio Amachree writes from Stockholm.

Two notes for publication. Everything asserted above about Chagoury, Tajideen, Saade, Taher, the Fawaz brothers and the Kano case rests on court records, Treasury designations or Nigerian court judgments, and I have been careful to record the acquittals and the Supreme Court reversal alongside the allegations, because that contrast is the strongest part of the argument. On Boulos I have deliberately confined myself to conflict of interest and unanswered disclosure questions, since there is no criminal finding against him .

[ARISE NEWS @ARISEtv]

Presidency says Cardinal Onaiyekan breached confidentiality by discussing bishops’ private meeting with President Tinubu during an ARISE News interview. https://t.co/SmMslEnEgt

[ARISE NEWS @ARISEtv]

Nigerians Should Be Focusing On Money Being Embezzled, Not The Atiku-Tinubu Dispute - Sambo

You listened to Peter Obi yesterday when he made it clear that the issues that should dominate our attention as Nigerians are not being discussed. Instead, the focus should be on what political parties will do to promote good governance, reduce the number of out-of-school children, cut the cost of governance, and take a critical look at the corruption within government.

Sumner Sambo, ARISE News Director Of News And Politics Editor

[OurFaveOnlineDoc 🇬🇧 🇳🇬 @OurFavOnlineDoc]

If you own/drive a car in Nigeria, pls always buy new tires from reliable dealers.

There are people who trim old worn out tires and resell it as “fairly used”. A friend mentioned to me that mechanics in Lagos and Abuja now do this scam.

This is criminal.

[Abdulganiyu Vinod Obasa @ganiyuobasa2025]

SMART AGEGE: SEE IT. BELIEVE IT.

A city that is serious about progress must also be serious about security, order, and accountability.

That is why we have commenced the deployment of CCTV cameras across strategic locations in Agege. These cameras will support security operations, improve traffic management, monitor environmental compliance, and help us respond faster to incidents across our communities.

The first phase is already live across key corridors, including Pen Cinema, Oke-Koto Junction, Iyana-Ipaja Road, Alfa Nla Road, and several other strategic locations, with more installations underway.

The message is simple: Agege is no longer being watched by chance, it is being protected by design.

The New Agege is Rising.

#agege #avo #avoisworking #smartagege #security #anewagegeisrising

[Peter Obi Grassroots Mobilization. @PO_GrassRootM]

Peter Obi is now being used as an example in Ghana 🇬🇭, yet some Nigerians continue to disrespect him because of the “see finish” mentality. It’s truly heartbreaking.

[Andrew @Andrewnkem]

For the alleged memo written by President’s Chief of Staff - Femi Gbajabiamila to NUPRC requesting 1.5% (N54bn) of their cost of collection and the “Fake Agency - PFIPC”, this is what Babachair Lawal, Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation has to say.

“In this particular example you gave, supposing the Chief of Staff wrote to the President, Sir, we need money for so so so so and we can get it from the 4% of the cost of collection from this agency and the President says “Approved”. He will write to them and say bring this money but we don’t know if the President had given him the approval, but if the President gave him the approval, he has not done wrong about it” …but if it’s done illegally, it is criminal!
As for the “Fake Agency PFIPC”, the issue I have with that is when the Chief of Staff did a press conference disowning this agency, it is not his duty to disown agencies, okay. Then the Chief Press Secretary to the President wrote also to defend his position, I smelt a fish. The Chief of Staff is an unknown entity in administration, he works in his office quietly. He works at the pleasure of the President. .. all he would have done is to report it to the police. In this government, I don’t think they can swear on oath that they don’t sell appointments. …As for the fake agency, nothing will come out of it, and Nigerians know they will whitewash it and clear everybody or may be find a small victim and hang him or hang this small chap (the impostor DG)”

[Channels Television @channelstv]

Seun: "When politicians come on my programme and keep mentioning your name, how does that make you feel?"

Peter Obi: "Calling me names doesn't make me feel anything. They are abandoning the issues we are supposed to discuss and discussing what I think is irrelevant. Instead of discussing the problems of the country, people come before you to discuss Peter Obi.

#SundayPolitics

[Nigeria Stories @NigeriaStories]

Man chase armed Police men with stick in Bayelsa. They all ran away after they shot him and it didn’t work.

[ARISE NEWS @ARISEtv]

No Business Owner Can Currently Afford A 30% Interest Rate On Borrowings In Nigeria — Chizea

CBN might be handicapped because they don’t have the tools to fight inflation. Monetary policy rate should be the lowest in the economy, while interest rates should be a lower single digit if we want an effective banking system.

Dr. Boniface Chizea
Economist and Financial Affairs Activist

[oseni rufai @ruffydfire]

I

[Kalu Aja @FinPlanKaluAja1]

Seun should go back to.,.checks notes….

Never mind

[Peter Obi Grassroots Mobilization. @PO_GrassRootM]

We are grateful no lives were lost in the Enugu Airline flight incident. Authorities must thoroughly investigate the cause and prevent a recurrence.

[AFC Xtra @AFC__Xtra]

🚨Fabrizio Romano; 🗣️

“BTS, Mikel Arteta is PUSHING like crazy to sign Bruno Guimarães.” 🇧🇷 🪄

🎥 via YouTube

[Bashir Ahmad, OON @BashirAhmaad]

My country, Nigeria, is full of remarkable history, culture and natural wonders. Here are 30 fascinating facts about the country that many people, including Nigerians, may not know.