By Isaac Samuel
On or before Friday this week (August 21), the FBI, Department of Justice and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) will release information relating to President Bola Tinubu’s drug-related offences when he lived in the United States of America over 40 years ago.
Judge Berryl Howell this week ordered the three agencies to release whatever information in their custody that relates to Tinubu’s links with drug trafficking based on the requests filed by former Nigerian President Atiku Abubarkar. The judge stated that since the request from Atiku had been pending for three years now, the Court has no option to order the release of the information.
This is the latest in the series of damaging information and news stories against President Tinubu that has emerged from the US in the last one year.
From accusations of failure to protect Nigerians from terrorism, talk of “Christian genocide”, in Nigeria, accusations of lack of fiscal transparency, and now the renewed push for the release of US records concerning allegations against President Bola Tinubu, the US government’s posture towards the Tinubu administration has become a political talking point in Nigeria.
But is the United States really turning against Tinubu, or is the presidency facing a more demanding relationship with Washington?
That is an awkward contradiction at the heart of Nigeria’s relationship with the United States under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
On one hand, the US government has repeatedly subjected the Tinubu administration to unusually public scrutiny over insecurity, religious freedom and, most recently, the management and lack of transparency in Nigeria’s public finances.
On the other, the same American administration that once threatened military action over the alleged persecution of Christians in Nigeria is now openly praising Tinubu’s leadership on deepening military and intelligence cooperation with Abuja.
That contradiction perhaps suggests that the question may not simply be whether the United States is against Tinubu. Rather, it may be that Washington is becoming more transactional, more demanding and less willing to give the Nigerian government the benefit of the doubt on issues that directly affect American interests.
And with Nigeria’s 2027 presidential election approaching, every critical assessment from the US is inevitably acquiring a political life of its own in Nigeria.
The latest episode is the United States Department of State’s fiscal transparency assessment, which found that Nigeria failed to meet the US government’s minimum requirements for fiscal transparency during the the last fiscal year.
The report faulted the availability and completeness of budget information, saying, among other things, that Nigeria’s budget documents did not provide a substantially complete picture of government revenues and expenditures and that actual revenues and expenditures did not reasonably correspond with those contained in the enacted budget.
The report also raised concerns about the independence and reporting of the Auditor-General.
The finding immediately became political ammunition for former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC).
Atiku’s camp seized on the American assessment as confirmation of criticisms it has repeatedly levelled against the Tinubu administration.
In a statement on August 13, Atiku argued that the US report had vindicated his long-standing position that the Federal Government was not sufficiently transparent about how public resources were generated and spent.
“Transparency is not a slogan. It is the foundation of good governance,” Atiku said.
He went further, arguing that Nigerians deserved to know where public money was coming from and where it was being spent.
For Atiku, therefore, the American assessment is more than an international report. It is political validation.
But the Presidency rejected the interpretation. Special Adviser to the President on Media and Public Communications, Sunday Dare, urged Nigerians to regard the US assessment as a limited compliance exercise rather than a comprehensive audit or verdict on the entire architecture of Nigeria’s public-finance reforms.
According to Dare, the report itself acknowledged improvements, including greater availability of budget documents and disclosure of public-debt information.
He said the government had also been working on its open-treasury platform, budget publication, debt-data disclosure and digital procurement systems.
That distinction matters.
Perhaps, the US Fiscal Transparency Report is not an indictment of President Tinubu personally, nor is it a comprehensive audit of every financial reform undertaken by his administration.
It is an assessment against specific American transparency benchmarks.
But that does not make the findings politically irrelevant.
Indeed, the uncomfortable question for the TInubu administration is why an administration that has made economic reform and fiscal restructuring central to its political message continues to attract criticism from Washington over the transparency of the very public finances it says it is reforming.
And this is where the latest criticism fits into a much larger pattern.
Indeed, the most dramatic confrontation between the US and Nigerian government came last year, when President Donald Trump accused Nigeria of failing to protect Christians from attacks by Islamist extremists.
Trump’s language was unusually severe.
He described Christianity as facing an “existential threat” in Nigeria, accused radical Islamists of carrying out mass killings and designated Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” over religious freedom.
He subsequently threatened possible US military action and warned that American assistance could be halted.
For a country that has traditionally enjoyed a strategic relationship with Washington, the threat was extraordinary.
More importantly, it placed the Tinubu administration in an uncomfortable position.
The Nigerian government rejected the portrayal of the country as religiously intolerant, insisting that the constitution guarantees freedom of religion and that terrorists have attacked Nigerians across religious lines.
Tinubu’s government maintained that the security crisis was real but disputed the suggestion that Nigeria was engaged in, or permitting, a systematic campaign of genocide against Christians.
The dispute quickly became bigger than Nigeria’s security crisis. It became a contest over who had the authority to define what was happening in Nigeria.
Trump’s version was essentially that Christians were being systematically slaughtered and that the Nigerian government was failing in its most basic responsibility.
Abuja’s argument was that the situation was far more complicated: Boko Haram, ISWAP, banditry, farmer-herder conflicts, communal violence, separatist violence and criminality have produced a security crisis in which Muslims and Christians alike have been victims.
That disagreement was particularly damaging because the American narrative could easily be converted into a referendum on Tinubu’s performance.
If the US was saying Christians were being massacred under his watch, the political implication was obvious: the government was failing to protect citizens.
But there was an unexpected twist. The US threat eventually became cooperation
The relationship did not end in confrontation. It moved in the opposite direction. Nigeria and the United States subsequently intensified security cooperation, including intelligence sharing, training and counterterrorism operations.
By July 2026, the tone from Trump himself had changed dramatically.
In a letter to Tinubu, Trump praised what he called the President’s decisive leadership in tackling terrorism and specifically commended his efforts concerning violence affecting Christian communities.
Trump said the US-Nigeria relationship was crucial and praised the 2026 Defence Cooperation Roadmap.
He also said the United States had deployed Special Operations Forces to equip Nigerian troops with training, tools and intelligence.
The two countries had also established a Joint Working Group, with cooperation involving training, intelligence sharing and joint operations. The Nigerian government says the partnership contributed to coordinated operations against terrorist targets.
But this is perhaps the strongest evidence against the argument that Washington has simply turned hostile to Tinubu.
If anything, it shows the opposite. The United States can publicly criticise the government and, at the same time, deepen its strategic partnership with the same government.
That is not necessarily inconsistency.
It may be realpolitik. The US can believe that Nigeria has serious shortcomings in security, religious freedom or fiscal transparency while simultaneously believing that Tinubu remains an important partner in containing terrorism and maintaining American influence in West Africa.
For an incumbent seeking another term, that kind of international criticism inevitably becomes campaign material.
Then came the budget issue. The fiscal transparency report presents a different kind of challenge.
Unlike Trump’s comments about Christianity, which were highly political and rhetorical, the State Department’s fiscal transparency assessment is built around defined criteria.
Its criticism is therefore more bureaucratic but potentially more consequential. The American assessment essentially asks whether citizens, investors and other stakeholders can obtain a sufficiently complete and timely picture of how government raises and spends money.
That touches the heart of Tinubu’s economic reform narrative. The administration has spent much of its political capital arguing that Nigeria’s economy inherited deep structural problems and that difficult reforms including the removal of the petrol subsidy and changes to the foreign-exchange system were necessary to put the country on a more sustainable path.
But fiscal reform without fiscal transparency creates a political vulnerability. Observers are of the opinion that if citizens are being asked to accept higher costs, increased taxes, borrowing and difficult economic adjustments, they will naturally demand greater clarity about government revenue and expenditure.
That is why the US report gives the opposition an opportunity to attack the administration which the Atiku immediately seized. The former Vice President’s response was not simply to welcome an American report. He tried to turn it into evidence for an argument he has already been making domestically.
In effect, his message was: this is not just Atiku saying it; now the United States is saying it too. Indeed, that is politically powerful.
It allows the opposition to borrow the credibility of an external institution and use it against an incumbent government.
Atiku’s response is therefore worth reading beyond the immediate statement.
He is attempting to establish a recurring political narrative around Tinubu: that the administration’s problems are not merely opposition allegations but are increasingly being identified by international institutions.
The strategy is familiar. If Atiku criticises Tinubu’s fiscal management, the government can dismiss him as a political opponent. If the United States raises similar concerns, the argument becomes more difficult to dismiss.
The opposition can then say: we told you.
This is precisely what Atiku’s August 13 statement attempted to do.
He pointed to the American findings on budget disclosure, revenue and expenditure discrepancies and audit institutions as confirmation of his own previous criticisms.
Tinubu’s drug records controversy is perhaps the most damaging of all, and together with the the fiscal report from the State Department, it has delivered overwhelming embarrassment and humiliation to the Nigerian President.
The latest controversy concerns efforts to obtain records from US government agencies relating to allegations that have been made about Tinubu on his drug-trafficking activity in the United States.
A US-based policy and lobbying firm retained by Atiku has said a federal prosecutor appointed during the Trump administration has begun steps to comply with a court order concerning records held by the Department of Justice, FBI and DEA.
The firm said US Attorney Jeanine Pirro sought an additional 10 days to comply, while District Judge Beryl Howell granted four days, setting August 21 as the new deadline.
That development should, however, be treated with considerable caution. The existence of a court process concerning records does not establish that the allegations against Tinubu are true.
Tinubu has denied wrongdoing, and the long-running controversy over the $460,000 forfeiture in the United States has generated competing interpretations of what the underlying civil forfeiture proceedings meant.
Tinubu’s defenders have consistently stressed that the forfeiture was a civil, in-rem proceeding involving money rather than a criminal prosecution of Tinubu, and that he was never criminally convicted of a drug offence in the United States.
But a court ordering the release of government records does not itself constitute a judicial finding that the allegations contained in those records are true.
Yet politically, the timing could hardly be more significant. With Tinubu preparing for the 2027 election, any renewed American revelation concerning his past will inevitably be weaponised by political opponents.
And Atiku’s association with efforts to obtain those records makes the issue even more politically charged. But some people are of the opinion that if the contents of those files were not that damaging, Tinubu would not have been fighting to keep them away from the public. Whatever the case, Nigerians will soon find out what are in the files and the extent to which they’d be used to scuttle Tinubu’s chances of reelection.
So, is the United States getting too hard on Tinubu? There’s no evidence that Washington has completely turned against the Nigerian President.
In fact, the US continues to cooperate with Nigeria on counterterrorism, intelligence, defence and regional security. Trump himself, after some of his harshest public criticism of Nigeria, has gone on to praise Tinubu’s leadership and the bilateral security partnership.
It is however notable that Washington is prepared to publicly identify weaknesses in Nigeria’s governance while simultaneously pursuing its strategic interests with Nigeria.
Analysts would say the United States does not have to choose between cooperation and criticism. It can do both.
The Christian genocide controversy showed Washington applying pressure on security and religious freedom.
The fiscal transparency report shows pressure on public-finance governance.
The continuing records controversy puts renewed attention on unresolved questions surrounding Tinubu’s past in the United States.
Taken together, these episodes create a narrative that his political opponents can exploit.
The closer Nigeria moves towards the 2027 election, the more valuable every international criticism of Tinubu becomes to the opposition.
Atiku appears particularly conscious of this. His response to the fiscal transparency report demonstrates the political calculation.He does not need Washington to endorse his candidacy.
He needs Washington to raise questions about Tinubu that he can then amplify in Nigeria. That is a much more useful political asset.
The same applies to the controversy over the US records. The more American institutions discuss documents connected to allegations concerning Tinubu’s past, the easier it becomes for the opposition to keep those allegations in the public conversation irrespective of whether the eventual records contain anything that materially changes the established legal picture.
