I was in the room at Nigeria’s Mission House in New York on Wednesday when we took an important step forward for our economy.
Our Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Hon. @AlakeDele and US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau signed a new framework to deepen investment in Nigeria’s $700 billion mineral resources.
The focus of the framework is to move beyond simply exporting raw materials by building a stronger local value chain through processing, exploration, better infrastructure and technical capacity.
This will help us turn Nigeria’s mineral wealth into lasting growth and support President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda to diversify our economy.
It was encouraging to witness this firsthand. We must keep working to ensure that opportunities like this create real benefits for our people in Lagos and across Nigeria.
APC CAMPAIGN COUNCIL
PRESS STATEMENT
PARIS ICC ARBITRATION COURT RULING: ATIKU ABUBAKAR UNFIT FOR NIGERIA'S PRESIDENCY
Atiku Abubakar, the African Democratic Congress candidate, is unfit to be President of Nigeria because he has once again proven he will compromise Nigeria’s best interests for personal, fiduciary gain.
Abubakar’s legendary corruption reverberated in Paris at the International Arbitration Tribunal under the auspices of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). Hearings in the arbitration filed by Sunrise Power and Transmission Company Ltd (Sunrise) and Leno Adesanya over the stalled 3960mw Mambila Hydroelectric Power Project in Taraba State revealed that Abubakar and former power minister Olu Agunloye worked in cahoots to sign an illegal power contract with Sunrise.
The backdoor signing of the contract in the dying days of then President Olusegun Obasanjo’s first term, when Atiku wielded enormous power, put Nigeria in a serious financial peril, despite President Obasanjo’s objection and reservations at the Federal Executive Council meeting.
Atiku’s greed, however, propelled him to disobey the council and President Obasanjo, months after Leno Adesanya, through an offshore account, China Castle Investment, wired $500,000 to the US Citibank account of his now-divorced wife, Jennifer Douglas. The money arrived in tranches, raising red flags at Citibank and in the United States. The wired money and other suspicious transfers totalling $40 million surfaced in a US Senate investigation into Atiku and other corrupt leaders. In the US Senate report titled Keeping Foreign Corruption out of the United States: Four Case Histories, Jennifer said her husband sent the money. She said she was not familiar with the offshore company that wired the money.
Atiku’s treasonable act, after the Nigerian government declined to go ahead with the illegal contract, led Sunrise and Leno Adesanya to make a claim against the Federal Republic of Nigeria, demanding $680 million as a settlement sum and interest in respect of another arbitration in which it is claiming over $2.7 billion in compensation and interest relating to disputes associated with the development of the Mambilla Hydro Power project.
As the ICC Paris Tribunal concluded: "There is a close connection in time between the moment the USD 500,000 payment was made to the wife of Vice-President Abubakar on 30 January 2003 and the alleged award of the BOT contract to Sunrise on 22 May 2003."
Nigeria fought valiantly to dodge this huge liability, echoing a similar attempt by another rogue company, Process and Industrial Development (P&ID), to extract an $11 billion claim from our country for a phantom gas project in Akwa Ibom that the company did not spend a dime on.
By collecting a $500,000 bribe from Leno Adesanya to approve a Build-Operate-Transfer contract to a company with no scintilla of experience in hydro power generation, Atiku has proven he is one of the enablers of local and international predatory and exploitative entities out to defraud our country.
At the hearing in Paris, Atiku, to avoid embarrassment, chose to stay away to give evidence in support of Sunrise and Leno Adesanya’s specious claim that the $500,000 was a foreign exchange transaction. Although the Tribunal requested Atiku’s witness statement, Adesanya shielded Atiku and Jennifer Douglas by lying. In contrast, President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Muhammadu Buhari went to Paris to defend Nigeria and help stave off a liability that our country can ill-afford to redeem in these lean times.
The disclosure in Paris once again justified President Obasanjo's scathing remarks about Atiku’s corruption in his book, My Watch. “ What I did not know”, the former Nigerian leader wrote in the second part of the book, “which came out glaringly later, was his parental background, which was somewhat shadowy, his propensity to corruption, his tendency to disloyalty, his inability to say and stick to the truth all the time, a propensity for poor judgement, his belief and reliance on marabouts, his lack of transparency, his trust in money to buy his way out on all issues and his readiness to sacrifice morality, integrity, propriety, truth and national interest for self and selfish interest.”
The APC Campaign calls on Abubakar Atiku to do himself a rare honour by bowing out of the presidential race, as the $500,000 bribe is just the tip of the iceberg of the revelations to come about his monumental corruption.
The people of Taraba State should also note that the ADC candidate, who plans to pull wool over our eyes and bamboozle his way to the presidency as a pro-petrol-subsidy candidate, is one of the people responsible for the stalled kick-off of what would have been the biggest hydro-power project in Nigeria, with many economic spin-offs for the people of the state.
Dele Alake,
Spokesman of the APC Presidential Campaign Council,
Abuja
September 18, 2026
Atiku was vice president when his then wife received 500k dollars from Leno Adesanya, the man chasing the Mambilla contract. Adesanya admitted making the payment. Nigeria told the tribunal it was a corrupt arrangement meant to influence Atiku. The ICC later dismissed Sunrise Power’s 2.35 billion dollar claim against Nigeria.
https://t.co/woqVnT4GYW
The French President, Emmanuel Macron, loves, sees and treats President Tinubu like a father. You can see it in his body language whenever they are together.
It was a pleasure to share a private dinner with President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace in Paris. @EmmanuelMacron
Our conversation reaffirmed the strong friendship between Nigeria and France, as well as our shared commitment to deepening cooperation and building a mutually beneficial partnership between our two nations.
I thank President Macron for his warm hospitality and friendship.
@NigeriaGov@NGRPresident
You folks thought Bamboo and the Fintechs were really the issue? 😂
I just got off a phone call with a key figure in my traditional Brokerage Firm and I can tell you this IPO is exposing something much bigger.
It has pushed the existing NGX/CSCS infrastructure harder than they anticipated.
I'm being told CSCS has been creating new accounts at a rate they haven't seen before so much so that the system has had to prioritise onboarding these new investors, while things like name changes and address changes that would ordinarily be handled quickly are taking a back seat.
CSCS reportedly even had to create a ��situation room” to help deal with the unprecedented volume of new account openings coming from this IPO.
And this is the part I think many people are missing.
Bamboo and other fintechs are only the front door.
The bigger story is the number of NEW PEOPLE being pulled into the Nigerian capital market.
Diasporans want in, Young Nigerians want in, First-time investors want in. People who have never owned a Nigerian stock before are suddenly trying to get CSCS accounts because they want a piece of Dangote Refinery.
Reuters is already reporting just how extraordinary the demand has been, including a 10× traffic surge on Bamboo within 30 minutes of the IPO going live.
Do you guys understand what Dangote has done here for the market at large???
This isn't just about Dangote Refinery IPO, but it's definitely a catalyst, the much needed spark we needed.
It's about market participation.
It's about bringing millions of potential investors into the NGX ecosystem.
It's about Nigerians in the diaspora looking at the Nigerian capital market differently.
It's about the NGX becoming a market people outside Nigeria are beginning to pay attention to.
EYL by Rashad Bilal and Ian Dunlap @_masterinvestor all talking about the Dangote Refinery IPO and why some exposure is needed, interesting times are here guys.
And with FTSE Russell's frontier-market development around the NGX already underway, this could be the beginning of a very interesting period for the Nigerian capital market.
If S&P Global and MSCI also deepen their recognition/coverage of the market, the potential implications for visibility, institutional participation, liquidity and capital formation could be significant.
Welcome to a new era. 🇳🇬📈
Because a typical Nigerian is not a patient man, we want to eat our cake and have it at the same time. Once that #525 dropped down a little after listing, they will start panic selling.
I want to Thank President Tinubu for taking bold moves by removing the subsidy, by democratizing the exchange rate, and also for this refinery.
- Aliko Dangote