An aide said the Nigerian leader engaged PR firms after evaluating the impact widespread coverage of his narcotics and diploma mess had on his prestige before his foreign peers.

ADEFEMOLA AKINTADE and Ambali Abdulkabeer • January 6, 2025
Peoples Gazette

President Bola Tinubu has hired lobbyists in the United States to help convince lawmakers and policymakers that he carries acceptable personal probity to lead Nigeria, Peoples Gazette can report, after suffering a reputational hit that followed reports of his involvement in illicit drug peddling and certificate fraud.

Mr Tinubu engaged public relations experts, including David Spaulding of Lenape Legal, based in a sleepy Philadelphia suburb, to help his administration navigate Washington’s concerns about his unsavoury public profile, The Gazette learned via documents and sources familiar.

The Nigerian leader deemed the hirings necessary after evaluating the impact widespread coverage of his narcotics and certificate saga had on his prestige before his foreign counterparts, a senior administration official said under anonymity to discuss the president’s key vulnerability. Mr Spaulding’s firm indicated it started work in April 2024, a few months after Nigerians’ interest in the scandal peaked and the Supreme Court said it was insufficient to truncate Mr Tinubu’s nascent tenure.

“The president feels that the bad stories are impeding his ability to govern,” the official at the justice ministry said. “Look, I mean, some of us know they look down on him like a pariah, which is unfair.”

“You can see the president taking pictures with world leaders, but no one answers his calls to discuss social and economic issues affecting Nigeria, which is what he actually needs,” the official added.

Mr Tinubu has attended summits of global leaders in France, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia, among others, but those invitations were largely statutory for Nigeria as Africa’s most populous and largest economy. What Mr Tinubu really wanted, the aide said, was to be given special foreign policy concessions, similar to how Nigeria scored big under former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan.

His attempt to flex international muscle months after assuming office ended in humiliation after the Emiratis repudiated key prongs of an agreement he purportedly locked in following a meeting in Abu Dhabi in September 2023.

The Nigerian economy has trended rapidly downward since Mr Tinubu’s inauguration in May 2023, and critics say he overfilled his cabinet with corrupt and incompetent politicians with limited contacts outside Nigeria. Atiku Bagudu, infamous for helping former dictator Sani Abacha launder billions in stolen public funds in the 1990s, and Nyesom Wike, a lifelong alcoholic who did not flinch from the label, are running and debasing key ministries, departments, and agencies.

Another shady minister, Uche Nnaji, has remained in Mr Tinubu’s cabinet more than six months after The Gazette exposed how he forged the national youth service certificate he submitted to the Nigerian Senate to scale confirmation.

But administration officials readily dismissed opposition attacks that the president was haemorrhaging credibility, relying on not just his foreign trips but also the quality of foreign leaders he has entertained at the State House, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The justice ministry official said the president followed advice to “reconstruct his image” with members of the U.S. House of Representatives, senators, and White House officials. The official added that the contracts, some of which were signed for the ‘Government of Nigeria’ to obscure Mr Tinubu’s personal stake, would satisfy the chores.

The Gazette was told that Mr Tinubu was still furious over the role of the Nigerian media and opposition leader Atiku Abubakar in fragmenting the charges and spreading them across Nigeria and beyond.

The allegations, while substantially factual, were by themselves not entirely new, but their discussion had been largely restricted to online chat boards and idiosyncratic spotlights on social media platforms for several years until Mr Abubakar sought to use them to blunt Mr Tinubu’s appeal ahead of the 2023 elections. After Mr Tinubu was declared winner, Mr Abubakar’s legal team prioritised factual elements of the claims while litigating the vote outcome before the election petitions tribunal and, ultimately, the Supreme Court.

Mr Tinubu’s involvement in the cocaine business, which he still denies despite U.S. law enforcement’s account, had suffused Nigerian political circles and commentariat since he first forfeited about half a million dollars to the U.S. government in 1993.

However, the general public’s understanding of the case did not come until November 2022, when The Gazette was the first to publish the entire case file (PDF) as certified and released by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago.

Days after The Gazette ran the Chicago court documents, journalist David Hundeyin premiered a documentary about Mr Tinubu’s extensive network in narcotics trafficking, significantly raising the stakes over the prospect of his presidency. The justice ministry official said Mr Hundeyin’s video was among the material the lobbyists planned to push back against when relating with U.S. representatives.

Mr Abubakar’s campaign played a role in spreading the document, and his supporters joined forces with compatriots in Peter Obi’s Labour Party to demoralise the Tinubu camp for several weeks leading to the February 25, 2023, poll. Mr Tinubu was declared winner of the exercise with barely 36 per cent, the lowest as a share of total vote since the 1979 elections that threatened the nation’s fabric.

While the certificate scandal did not mature until after the election, it was perhaps the most challenging for the president to dismiss. For weeks, he mounted a fervent effort to obstruct disclosure of his records from Chicago State University. The school’s administrators also appeared sympathetic to Mr Tinubu’s dubious tactics until a federal judge ordered a deposition of the school’s registrar, which showed that both the school and Mr Tinubu had a lot to hide.

Several inconsistencies in the school’s records, compared to decades of public knowledge about Mr Tinubu, showed that the Nigerian president had tendered a falsified academic document to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Nonetheless, justices on the Supreme Court of Nigeria affirmed his victory, ignoring constitutional language that said no candidate who presented a false document to INEC would be eligible to stand in an election.

Whereas the CSU moved on after earning a reputation among Nigerians as a diploma mill by simply locking its Twitter page, Mr Tinubu was unable to assert the same convenience. The Nigerian leader staggered from one scandal to another, and some countries activated measures that all but suggested a collective punishment of Nigerians for their leader’s sins.

Still, Mr Tinubu, 72, failed to indicate immediate readiness to turn over a new leaf as he approved a multibillion-dollar road contract from Lagos to Calabar for his crony and convicted money launderer, Gilbert Chagoury. Mr Chagoury’s son is also in business with Seyi Tinubu, the president’s plutocratic son.

Nigeria’s corruption perception under Mr Tinubu has not improved compared to previous administrations. His family members, allies, and top aides, including his disgraced chief of staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, have been accused of selling appointments and access for cash.

Last week, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project ranked Mr Tinubu among the world’s most ruthless, corrupt leaders, eliciting anger from his allies who alleged a global conspiracy to delegitimise his government overseas.

“We’ve helped individuals with worse reputations secure support of U.S. officials,” a Nigerian PR contractor who took part in the $2.7 million deal told The Gazette by telephone over the weekend. “The president didn’t have to do this if not for the campaign of calumny coming from the likes of Atiku and Hundeyin and the Nigerian media, but his desire to remove obstacles and work for the Nigerian people was too strong.”

A spokesman did not return The Gazette’s request for comments on behalf of Mr Abubakar. In the past, the opposition leader had hired lobbyists to soothe Washington insiders following a U.S. Senate report accusing him of corruption, which he denied.

Still, a source close to the former vice-president said the opposition will continue to draw attention to Mr Tinubu’s myriad falsehoods, especially those relating to his alleged college diploma, early schools, and even his parentage will continue to be challenged.

The contractor said Mr Spaulding’s firm was engaged as part of the $2.7 million campaign the president sanctioned in February 2024, while some other firms in Nigeria and the Washington D.C. area took disparate cuts. American government documents seen by The Gazette showed Mr Spaulding said he took the job for $130,000 per year. His family member Isobel ‘Kate’ Spaulding and another executive assistant Caroline Colmary accepted $48,000 per year. Mr Spaulding listed Nigerian diplomats in Washington as contact persons for the contract.

Mr Spaulding’s sprawling business in Sub-Saharan Africa also saw him sign contracts to lobby on behalf of Mali and Ivory Coast in Washington, filings said.

The Gazette was also told that Global Strategy, an online reputation management firm, was engaged for two years at $410,000 per year as part of the deal. A spokesman for the firm did not return a request for comments, and Mr Spaulding also did not answer calls and messages about Lenape’s contract.

How many PR firms and intermediaries were contracted with the $2.7 million budget remained unclear as of weekend, even though officials stated that the amount could be substantially more based on changing dynamics. It was also unclear how Mr Tinubu paid for the contract. Officials said they couldn’t determine whether the president sourced the funds privately or tapped federal coffers.

When President Jonathan and his party, PDP, hired U.S. lobbyists in the run-up to Nigeria’s 2015 elections, the party settled the bill, according to disclosure documents. However, it was unclear if the former president had advanced the funds to party leadership before the firms were engaged.

Mr Tinubu’s party mocked the use of foreign lobbyists at the time, and his ally and ex-ruling party spokesman Lai Mohammed now works as a lobbyist at Ballard Partners, despite raising the loudest noise against foreign interference in Nigerian affairs on behalf of Mr Tinubu and other leaders of the APC.

Presidential spokespeople sidestepped efforts by The Gazette to get them on the record for this story. But an aide said the presidency was withholding comment because the subject matter was not illegal.

“The president can procure the services of experts to carry out assignments that will benefit Nigeria as a whole, so we can’t see what is illegal in that from our end,” the president’s assistant said, insisting not to be named because the matter had not been discussed internally before The Gazette put the aides on notice that this article was being prepared.