A former high-level insider from Nigeria’s Second Republic has broken decades of silence, offering a scathing, behind-the-scenes critique of the nation’s political class and warning that the systemic corruption born in the 1980s persists under current President Bola Tinubu.
Kio Amachree, now the President of Worldview International, revealed that as a 23-year-old National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member in 1982, he possessed top-secret security clearance, routinely handling classified presidential briefings inside Nigeria’s National Assembly and the Presidency.
In an explosive memoir-style exposé, Amachree described the administration of then-President Shehu Shagari as a “combustible experiment” characterized by runaway public debt, industrial collapse, and rampant financial fraud.
Amachree, who comes from a prominent legal and diplomatic family, painted a picture of a political elite fully aware of their impending doom but consumed by performance. He recounted an incident where, while suffering from a severe hangover, he was assigned to escort a visiting Chinese Premier, leading the foreign dignitary in “slow circles through marble corridors.”
“Power is largely theatre,” Amachree observed, recalling how the National Security Organization (NSO) guards whispered to ask if he had been drinking while he led one of the world’s most powerful men in circles.
The exposé sheds light on the final months of the Second Republic before it was toppled by a military coup led by Major-General Muhammadu Buhari on December 31, 1983. According to Amachree, top officials knew the military was preparing to strike due to massive state plundering, inflated contracts, and the manipulation of foreign exchange.
He recalled a dry admission from then-Senate President Joseph Wayas, who told him ahead of the 1983 Christmas break that he was heading to Calabar “to wait it out and see if the Khaki boys allow us to return in January.”
The account also provides rare personal glimpses into figures who would later shape Nigeria’s destiny, including a then-Brigadier Sani Abacha, whom Amachree described as a “compact, quiet man” navigating Lagos high society alongside his wife, Maryam, before his eventual rise as a military dictator.
Amachree argued that the culture of easy wealth—typified by the lucrative trading of government import licenses in 1982—laid the groundwork for the modern Nigerian political system.
“What separates them from you is not wisdom, not virtue, not mandate,” Amachree wrote, addressing the public. “It is proximity to the state treasury and the will to use it before someone else does.”
The revelations come amid intensifying online friction between Amachree and supporters of the current administration. Dismissing attacks from President Bola Tinubu’s online defenders, Amachree pointed out that while he was reading top-secret intelligence files and consulting with the architects of the Nigerian state in 1982, “Tinubu was in Chicago.”
Amachree concluded with a cynical assessment of Nigeria’s state secrecy, asserting that “classified” information is routinely shared casually among elites at private clubs, while the real secret remains the “elaborate performance of authority” used to mask the flight of the nation’s wealth offshore.
Vowing to continue writing despite political pushback, Amachree stated: “Nigeria deserves better… And I will not stop.”
The Presidency has not yet issued an official response to Amachree’s statements.
