AN OPEN LETTER TO MY IGBO BROTHERS AND SISTERS
Written in grief, in solidarity, and in truth
Stockholm, Sweden — April 2026
My Dear Igbo People,
Before I write a single word of politics, I must speak of blood. My father’s eldest sister was Margaret Anyansi — Aunt Maggie. She had five sons. Five young Igbo men who came into this world full of life and left it hollowed out by a war that should never have been fought the way it was. Four of them fought for Biafra. Four of them carried that war home inside them and never recovered. The fifth, the eldest, watched his brothers break apart one by one — and broke with them. Their mother, Aunt Maggie, eventually gave up on living. An entire male line. Gone. And they were my cousins. My blood.
Do not ever — not once — call me anti-Igbo again. I will not accept it. I will not dignify it with patience. The Anyansi name is written into my grief. The Nigeria-Biafra war did not happen to someone else’s family. It happened to mine. The wounds are not abstract to me — they are ancestral, they are personal, and they are permanent.
I lost five cousins to that war. I will not lose a generation of Igbo people to a man who has already robbed them.
I write this letter because I stand with you. Because the southeast of Nigeria has waited long enough. Because your turn is not a favour to be granted — it is a political reality that the rest of Nigeria must confront. And it is a reality that Bola Ahmed Tinubu is actively working to deny you.
Let us speak plainly about what has been done to Nigeria — and to you in particular. Thirteen billion dollars in public contracts and financial arrangements have flowed in the direction of Gilbert Chagoury — a man with a Swiss money laundering conviction on his record, a man identified in U.S. federal reports for alleged ties to Hezbollah financing. This is not rumour. This is documented. This is on the public record. And the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has placed his own son, Seyi Tinubu, on the board of this man’s corporate interests.
Thirteen billion dollars. Let that figure sit with you. Do you know what thirteen billion dollars means for the southeast? For Enugu, for Anambra, for Imo, for Ebonyi, for Abia? That is infrastructure. That is hospitals with functioning equipment. That is power plants that actually generate electricity. That is roads that do not swallow vehicles. That is universities that can pay their lecturers. That is a generation of Igbo children who do not have to leave home to survive.
Instead, what does the administration offer you? What is the response to your suffering — to your fuel queues, your darkened towns, your shuttered businesses, your brilliant children schooling by candlelight? Rice. Cooking oil. City Boy branding. Seyi Tinubu and the City Boy Movement, distributing bags of rice in communities hollowed out by the very policies his father has implemented. The audacity is staggering. The insult is beyond comprehension. It is a slap in the face of every Igbo man and every Igbo woman — and they expect you to clap.
They gave you rice and cooking oil in exchange for thirteen billion dollars to a convicted money launderer. That is what your loyalty has been worth to this administration.
And the sycophants from within our communities — I say this with sorrow, not contempt — who have chosen comfort over conscience, who have traded political access for moral authority: they will answer for it. History is unforgiving to collaborators. The Igbo people are not a people who forget.
Now I speak to the future. A federal court in the United States, under the authority of Judge Beryl Howell, has ordered the release of sealed FBI and DEA files relating to the sitting Nigerian president. These files exist. That order exists. The deadline is June 2026. The world is watching. The truth, buried for decades under layers of legal manoeuvring and political protection, is finally moving toward the light. A man with sealed heroin-related charges — charges now ordered open by a federal judge — cannot be allowed another term in Aso Rock. Not while your communities suffer. Not while your money goes to Lebanese boardrooms.
The political arithmetic of 2027 is not complicated. The southeast is Nigeria’s most educated bloc, its most entrepreneurially productive, its most globally connected diaspora. You have the intellectual capital, the economic energy, and the moral authority. What you have lacked, historically, is unified political will at the presidential level. 2027 is your moment. Do not squander it on a man who has already shown you exactly who he is.
Wake up. Unite. It is your turn. Demand an Igbo president in 2027.
I am Kio Amachree. I am Ijaw. I am from the Niger Delta. My family and yours have not always been on the same side of history — and I say that honestly, because real solidarity does not require the erasure of hard truths. But on this, we are aligned: Nigeria cannot continue under the weight of this corruption. The south must stand together. The minorities and the majority of the southeast must find common cause. And the Igbo people, who have sacrificed more than almost any other group in the making and remaking of this nation, deserve to lead it.
I lost cousins — Anyansi men, Igbo men — to a war fought over the right to determine your own destiny. Let their deaths mean something. Let the broken heart of Aunt Maggie mean something. Let the silence of those five graves mean something. Do not hand your political future to the man who is robbing your present.
The diaspora is watching. The international community is watching. The courts are moving. The documents are coming. And when they arrive, every vote cast in support of this administration will need to be explained.
I ask only this: be worthy of what your people have endured. Vote with your conscience, not with a bag of rice.
In solidarity and in truth,
Kio Amachree
President, Worldview International
Political Commentator & Diaspora Activist
Stockholm, Sweden
This letter may be freely shared, republished, and distributed without alteration.
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