Kio Amachree is a friend of mine and President of Worldview International, a Stockholm-based diaspora accountability platform.
His eloquent and fearless attacks on Tinubu and his cronies have turned him into one of the most popular critics of the Nigerian government. He comes from my home state, Rivers, and stands out from the crowd at a time when most of our fellow Riverians are emotionally exhausted and remaining silent in the face of oppression. Since I have recently complained on my YouTube channel about Tinubu’s white enablers and am particularly disappointed in the authorities in the UK, a country I grew up in, I think I should share Kio’s views on the same topic. Excerpts:
“Britain Is Not a Bystander to Nigerian Corruption. Britain Is the Bank. I wrote to the editors. I wrote to the ministers. Only the Serious Fraud Office answered. The silence of the rest is not neutrality — it is complicity, and I am done pretending otherwise. I have spent the past year doing what British journalism and British government were supposed to do themselves. I documented. I cited court records. I wrote to newspaper editors across London — not one replied. I wrote to government ministers and departments — not one responded. The only institution in the entire United Kingdom that had the professionalism to sit across a table from me was the Serious Fraud Office. One. Out of all of them.
Let me tell you why the rest looked away. It is not ignorance. It is not bureaucratic inertia. It is arithmetic. The Thieves and the Receivers: There is an old principle in English law that the receiver of stolen goods is as guilty as the thief. Nigeria’s own presidential anti-corruption adviser once stood this principle in front of a British Prime Minister and called London “the most notorious safe haven for looted funds in the world.”
He was not exaggerating. He was being polite. Britain’s own National Crime Agency estimates that over £100 billion is laundered through or within the UK every single year. Its own risk assessment concedes that up to £10 billion of dirty money may flow through the London property market annually. These are not my figures. These are Her Majesty’s — now His Majesty’s — own enforcement agencies confessing, in print, to the scale of the laundromat they preside over. And for half a century, no nation’s stolen wealth has flowed through that laundromat more reliably than Nigeria’s.
The Pattern Is Not New. It Is the Business Model: Diepreye Alamieyeseigha was caught at Heathrow with suitcases of cash and £15 million in London real estate. The Abacha billions before him moved through Western banks while British regulators studied their shoes. Finance Uncovered and Premium Times identified UK property connected to more than one hundred wealthy and politically exposed Nigerians. Every one of those transactions had a British counterparty. A British banker who onboarded the client. A British solicitor who conveyed the property. A British compliance officer who waved it through. Where are their prosecutions? Where is the reckoning for the receivers?
Then Came the State Visit: In March 2026, President Bola Tinubu was received in Britain on a state visit, feted as bilateral trade hit a record £8.1 billion, with British exports to Nigeria surging past £5.7 billion and a trade surplus of over £3 billion flowing London’s way. This is the same Bola Tinubu who, in 1993, forfeited $460,000 to the United States government in a civil action — funds the U.S. courts found traceable to the proceeds of narcotics trafficking. That is not my allegation. That is a matter of American federal court record, and it has been for thirty-three years. This is the same presidency in whose orbit Gilbert Chagoury — convicted in Geneva in 2000 in connection with laundering Abacha-era funds — has flourished, his companies collecting billions in no-bid Nigerian contracts while being welcomed into the highest precincts of British public life, complete with hundreds of millions of pounds in UK export finance backing.
I wrote to the Prime Minister [Keir Starmer] about this. Formally. With documentation. Silence. Why the Silence? Follow the Surplus.
The answer is not complicated, and the British establishment should stop insulting our intelligence by pretending it is. Nigeria is the UK’s largest export destination in Africa. Seven Nigerian banks operate in London. Nigerian fintech firms are committing hundreds of millions of pounds to British headquarters. Nigerian elites educate their children in British schools, park their wealth in British postcodes, and litigate their disputes in British courts. Post-Brexit Britain, desperate for trade and capital, has made a cold calculation: the provenance of Nigerian money is a question best left unasked. The editors will not publish what the Treasury does not want examined. The ministers will not answer what the Foreign Office prefers buried.
So they look away. From the court records. From the convictions. From the documented forfeitures. From a diaspora writer in Stockholm who keeps putting the evidence on their desks.
What Britain Owes: Britain owes Nigeria more than asset-return ceremonies and £4.2 million press releases — crumbs returned from feasts consumed. It owes prosecution of the enablers: the bankers, lawyers, accountants, and agents who built careers laundering the inheritance of 230 million Nigerians. It owes a genuine, public answer to the documented record concerning those it now receives with full honors.
It owes the Serious Fraud Office — the one institution that did its job — the political backing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including into Downing Street’s guest list. Until then, let no British official lecture Africa on governance. The thief stole the money. But the receiver built the vault, polished it, and called it the City of London. I will keep writing. The record is permanent. And history is taking names.”
