By Kio Amachree*
Distinguished Chairman of INEC, My Lords of the Federal High Court and the appellate courts, the Inspector-General of Police, the Director-General of the DSS:
I write not as a partisan but as a Nigerian of a family that has served this country for a century, and I write in the plainest terms the gravity of this moment demands. On 1 August 2026, INEC published, pursuant to Section 29(3) of the Electoral Act, the Form EC9 and supporting particulars of the incumbent president seeking nomination for the 2027 election. That publication has placed before the entire nation, in black and white, a sworn record that no honest institution can now ignore.
THE FACTS NOW IN PUBLIC VIEW
One. The affidavit leaves the primary and secondary education fields entirely blank, for the second consecutive election cycle, offering only a 1979 university degree whose published certificate is barely legible.
Two. The affidavit lists a single private employer in an entire pre-political lifetime, Mobil Nigeria Limited, after the candidate’s previously claimed employment at Deloitte was denied by that firm itself in response to a lawful subpoena, together with his claim of 1.8 million dollars in remuneration there.
Three. There exists a certified record of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Case No. 93 C 4483, in which funds of 460,000 dollars held in accounts linked to the candidate were forfeited to the United States as proceeds traceable to narcotics trafficking and money laundering. This record is not rumour. It is a public judgment of a foreign court.
Four. United States federal agencies, including the FBI and DEA, resisted for years the release of investigative files concerning this same individual, litigated before Judge Beryl Howell in Washington DC, until compelled by court order to abandon their refusal to confirm or deny. The files that remain unreleased remain unreleased to this day.
THE LAW YOU ARE SWORN TO APPLY
Section 131(d) of the Constitution requires education to at least School Certificate level or its equivalent, as defined in Section 318(1). A candidate who cannot or will not state where he received primary or secondary education invites the gravest doubt as to whether that threshold is genuinely met, and INEC has the power and the duty to demand proof, not placeholders.
Section 137(1) of the Constitution disqualifies from the presidency, among others, any person under sentence or finding for an offence involving dishonesty or fraud. Whether the Chicago forfeiture and the sworn misstatements surrounding employment and education engage this provision is a question that must finally be answered on full evidence, not waved away on technicalities.
Form EC9 is an affidavit. The Oaths Act and Section 117 of the Criminal Code make the swearing of false statements a criminal offence, perjury, punishable with imprisonment. Section 29(6) of the Electoral Act commands that where a court finds information in that affidavit false as to constitutional eligibility, the court shall disqualify both candidate and sponsoring party. The word is shall. It admits no discretion.
MY DEMANDS
To INEC: You are not a post office. You are a constitutional body with power under Section 318 to satisfy yourselves of a candidate’s qualifications. I demand that you formally require of this candidate certified evidence of primary and secondary education, verifiable authentication of the university certificate directly from the issuing institution, and a sworn explanation of the discrepancies in his employment history, and that you decline to place his name on the ballot until and unless these are produced. To accept a blank affidavit from a sitting president while demanding full documentation from every clerk in your own employ is not neutrality. It is complicity.
To the courts: When these questions come before you, and they will, I ask only that you hear them on the merits. The 2023 decisions turned substantially on standing and procedure. History is watching to see whether the judiciary of Nigeria will ever allow the substance, the forfeiture record, the sworn contradictions, the blank spaces, to be examined in open court with full evidence. The Electoral Act’s restriction of standing in Section 29(5) to rival aspirants is a gate, not a wall, and the criminal law of perjury knows no such gate.
To the Inspector-General of Police: Perjury is a crime. False declaration to a public authority is a crime. I demand the opening of a criminal investigation into the sworn contents of the Form EC9 filings of 2022 and 2026, including the omitted Deloitte claim, the educational blanks, and the certificate now published. No citizen is above the criminal law, and Section 308 immunity is a postponement, not an absolution; investigation may proceed and prosecution awaits the end of tenure.
To the Director-General of the DSS: Your mandate is the internal security of Nigeria. I put to you a question of national security in its purest form. When the head of state of the Federal Republic is a man concerning whom a foreign power’s law enforcement agencies hold unreleased investigative files, files they fought in court for years to keep sealed, that foreign power holds leverage over the presidency of Nigeria. Whether or not any formal relationship exists, the leverage itself is the threat. Every negotiation over AFRICOM access, over basing, over intelligence sharing, over our sovereign resources, is conducted under the shadow of what Washington knows and Abuja’s people are not permitted to see. I demand a formal security assessment of this exposure, and I demand that its conclusions be placed before the Council of State and the National Assembly. A president who can be pressured is a president who cannot protect us.
TO MY FELLOW NIGERIANS
The documents are published. The blanks are visible. The foreign court records are certified. The denials from claimed employers are in writing. We are not asked to believe an allegation; we are asked to disbelieve our own eyes. A nation of 250 million people, with millions of brilliant, honest, documented graduates, is being told that the only man fit to lead it is one who cannot complete the education section of a form that every job-seeking youth corps member completes without difficulty. That is not leadership. That is an insult, and the world’s laughter at our expense is the price of our silence.
INEC must act. The courts must hear. The police must investigate. The DSS must assess. And if every institution fails, the Nigerian people must remember in January 2027 that the final tribunal in a democracy sits in the polling booth.
I make this demand openly, under my own name, from Stockholm, as my father and grandfather made their demands openly in their own generations. Let those who would defend the blank spaces do so as openly.
Yours in service of the Federal Republic
*Amachree is the founder and president, Worldview International,
Stockholm, Sweden
2 August 2026
#
