They Called Me Nigger, Wog and Coon. Now My Own People Have Joined the Queue — to Defend a Man Who Is Not Even Sure What He Is
*Kio Amachree | Stockholm, Sweden*
For most of my life I was called nigger. They called me wog. They called me coon, spook, sambo. In Sweden they called me *invandare* — the foreigner, the one who does not belong. From New Rochelle New York, to Eton, to Kent, back to New York, to Stockholm — you name it, they threw it at me. Every city. Every decade. Every shade of hatred the white world could manufacture, I received it. And I kept moving. I did not break. I built.
Now the insults come from my own Nigerian people. Now I am “Igbo.” Now I am “Fisherman.” One man has been all over my Twitter today, insulting me and the Igbo people, gloating about how they were defeated in the Civil War. So let me answer him plainly, for the record, once and for all.
My mother was Otunba Nike Oluwole, daughter of Chief Ben Oluwole. My mother was **Yoruba**. Not Igbo. Yoruba. As her people say:
*Ẹ jẹ́ kí a gbé orúkọ àwọn baba wa ga — a kì í gbàgbé ẹ̀jẹ̀ tí ó ń ṣàn nínú ara wa.*
“Let us honour the names of our fathers — we do not forget the blood that flows within us.”
My father was Chief Godfrey Kio Jaja Amachree, Queen’s Counsel — a Kalabari Royal of the Niger Delta, Nigeria’s first Solicitor-General, Acting Attorney-General, first Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice, and the United Nations’ first African Under-Secretary-General, who managed the Congo Crisis and guided the decolonisation of non-independent territories from Angola to the Pacific. He was the first Nigerian Chairman of the Nigerian Football Association — a position he served twice. He was General Gowon’s personal envoy to Washington during the Civil War. My grandfather, Chief Sekin Amachree, sat at the 1958 Constitutional Conference and the Willink Commission that shaped Nigeria’s very founding. From my father’s Kalabari Royal heritage, the people of the Niger Delta have always said:
*Bụ ama mi ama — mịngi bụ ama.*
“This is my land, my people’s land — the water and the earth know my name.”
I ask you again, my fellow Nigerians: where is the Igbo in that bloodline? You are calling the son of a Yoruba mother and a Kalabari Royal an Igbo — as an insult — to defend a man who is not even certain what he is himself. The ignorance is breathtaking.
But here is what I want you to understand above all else. It does not matter. Because I am not Yoruba. I am not Kalabari. I am not anything but Nigerian. As they say in the north — in Hausa, the language of millions of my fellow countrymen whose voices are also being drowned by this tribal poison:
*Ni ɗan Najeriya ne. Ba Yarabawa ba ne, ba Kalabarai ba ne — Najeriya ne kawai. Wannan ƙasata ce, kuma zan kāre ta.*
“I am a Nigerian. I am not Yoruba, I am not Kalabari — I am only Nigerian. This is my country, and I will defend it.”
I was born of this soil and I will defend it long after this government is dust and forgotten.
—
Now let us talk about who is really behind this epidemic of tribal hatred sweeping Nigeria. The documented record is damning. As one major analysis concluded:
*”Nigeria is currently navigating a volatile political landscape, with President Bola Tinubu’s regime at the centre of ethnic favouritism and policies that are deepening tribal divisions, raising concerns about the potential for civil war. Since assuming office, Tinubu has been criticised for concentrating power and key government positions in the hands of individuals from his Yoruba ethnic group — the Chief of Army Staff, the Inspector General of Police, the Customs Comptroller General, the Immigration Comptroller General, and the EFCC chairman, all reportedly from one tribe.”*
— West Africa Weekly, September 2025
Nigeria has never seen this before. Not even under the military. As one columnist wrote with surgical precision:
*”Never before has any Nigerian president — not even the military rulers — shown such blindness to equity and the unity and oneness of Nigeria. Nepotism, cronyism, ethnicism, discrimination, marginalisation and disdain for merit have long become the hallmark of the Bola Tinubu presidency. It feels like a gathering of an ethnic cabal.”*
— AllAfrica, March 2026
And what was the slogan he rode to power on? Scholars have documented it precisely:
*”The slogan emi lo kan — ‘it is my turn’ — was extended by his supporters to awa lo kan — ‘it is our turn’ — referring to the Yoruba people. The statement, credited to Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was meant to imply that after he had sacrificed for other politicians in the past, it was now his turn to become president — and by extension, the turn of the Yoruba.”*
— FWU Journal of Social Sciences, 2024
That is how he framed the presidency of a nation of 250 ethnic groups. His turn. His tribe’s turn. The most openly tribal campaign in Nigeria’s democratic history. And what followed on election day itself?
*”The 2023 elections in Lagos were marked by significant anti-Igbo sentiment. During the gubernatorial election, Igbo people were identified, beaten, and warned not to vote. Across Nigeria that day, there were many incidents of ethnicity-based voter intimidation. ‘We now understand that we are not one in Nigeria,’ said one voter forced to leave his polling unit in Surulere because he was Igbo.”*
— Coda Story / West Africa Weekly, 2023–2025
People were chased from polling booths for their ethnicity. In Lagos. In 2023. And the man who benefited from all of this now sits in Aso Rock, promoting himself as some great Yoruba warlord, the Mafia Boss of Lagos. Give me a break.
—
Because here is what the documented record shows about who Bola Ahmed Tinubu actually is. Professor Farooq Kperogi, one of Nigeria’s most respected scholars of language and politics, documented the following:
*”Pastor Tunde Bakare basically affirmed all the hitherto fringy whispers about Tinubu: that he is from Iragbiji in Osun State; that his current name is not his original name; that he has disowned his biological parents and adopted the Tinubu identity. He reportedly shunned the funeral of his own biological mother in Iragbiji. What remain obscured are who his biological parents were and why he assumed his current identity — and many Lagos natives say he does not even speak Yoruba with a Lagos accent.”*
— Prof. Farooq Kperogi, Notes From Atlanta / Tribune Online
And on the Tinubu name itself — the great Yoruba identity he waves like a flag over this nation — historians have established:
*”The ethnic provenance of the Tinubu family is traceable to what is now Borno State. The patriarch was a Kanuri man known as Momodu Bugara, an Islamic scholar who migrated from the defunct Bornu Empire to the Lagos Colony in the 1800s. The Tinubu family name in Lagos today is not a Yoruba name in origin. Most people who bear it today are not related to Madam Efunroye Tinubu who popularised it in nineteenth-century Lagos.”*
— Prof. Farooq Kperogi, Gazette NGR / Heritage Times
This man — who abandoned his own mother’s funeral, who adopted a name that is not his, whose family’s origins trace not to Yoruba soil but to the Bornu Empire — this is who you are throwing tribal insults to defend. He is not even sure what he is. And you are calling me Igbo.
He was a taxi driver in Chicago when he was not — by documented American federal proceedings — involved in the narcotics trade. The 1993 DEA asset forfeiture is a matter of public record. The FBI and DEA files are in federal court. Their disclosure deadline is June 1st, 2026. Those files will speak for themselves.
—
Tinubu has made tribalism and racism the latest trend in Nigeria. People are so easily bought. They have no shame, no loyalty to the state. They bow and prostrate to a man who stole a name, steals their money, gives them nothing in return, and wants to become the King of Nigeria.
As for the Igbo people — they are a great people. I salute them without reservation. They built Biafra from nothing, held it under blockade and bombardment, and when it ended, rebuilt themselves with a dignity that should inspire every Nigerian. To invoke the Civil War as a weapon against them dishonours every Nigerian who suffered in it — on every side.
Stop the tribalism. You are wasting your time when it comes to me.
*Mi ò ṣe Yorùbá, mi ò ṣe Kalabaari — mo jẹ́ ọmọ Nàìjíríà. Ilẹ̀ yìí ni ilẹ̀ mi.*
“I am not Yoruba, I am not Kalabari — I am a child of Nigeria. This land is my land.”
*Kada ku bari ƙiyayya ta raba mu. Mu Najeriya ne duka — kuma gaskiya za ta fito.*
“Do not let hatred divide us. We are all Nigeria — and the truth will come out.”
Over my dead body will I watch that man installed as dictator or king. I would rather burn in hell than see it. When the DEA files are disclosed on June 1st, 2026, you haters of those who do not carry Yoruba names will cry in shame. You will be ridiculed by every living Nigerian for prostrating before a man who was heavily involved in the heroin trade and has been selling Nigeria to the Americans and whoever pays him for years.
The names they called me changed with every country I entered. The truth never did. And it is coming.
—