First Sons are Back?

First Sons are Back?
By: Feyi Fawehinmi

Bloomberg has a blockbuster story made possible by the UK’s new register of overseas entities which gave a deadline of 31st January 2023 for all foreign entities owning property in the UK to declare who the beneficial owners of the entities are.

The Bloomberg story by William Clowes reveals that a property that was previously owned by Kola Aluko in the UK is now owned, effectively, by Seyi Tinubu, the President’s son:

The corporate documents seen by Bloomberg show for the first time that Tinubu’s 37-year-old son Oluwaseyi is the main shareholder of Aranda Overseas Corp., an offshore company that paid £9 million ($10.8 million) to Deutsche Bank for the property in North London in late 2017. The private three-floor residence in St. John’s Wood — a district favored by American bankers — is equipped with an eight-car driveway, two gardens, electric gates and a gym.

Two years ago, Nigeria’s Premium Times had reported on the former President Buhari visiting President Bola Tinubu at the property in London. The Premium Times report at the time said that the property had been bought by Aranda which was controlled by Gboyega Oyetola, former Osun State governor. The mistake came from the fact that Premium Times’ report was based on the Pandora Papers which only had documents up to 2010. It therefore missed that in 2011, control of Aranda shifted to Seyi Tinubu. So in effect, at the time the property was bought in 2017, it was bought by Seyi Tinubu.

The whole story is interesting and as a smart friend of mine quipped — money was stolen from Nigeria twice to pay for the same house by two different sets of politicians in two opposing parties. You really couldn’t make it up.

But it also is a foretaste of something I have been making noise about a lot lately that Nigerians (due to having a very young population and hardly any news reports from the 90s being available online) have largely forgotten what it is like to have a ‘First Son’ that is influential and throws his weight around. The last time this happened was when we had Ibrahim Abacha in the Abacha days. 

A story I remember from the time was how the renegade press were filled with reports about all the weapons that were found on the presidential jet after the crash that killed him and several of his friends, including the stunningly beautiful mechanical engineer Julie Osholukoya, his girlfriend at the time. To further illustrate this loss of memory point — it is near impossible to find a photo of Ms. Osholukoya anywhere on the internet now. You will have to take my word for it, she was an incredibly beautiful woman.

What was remarkable about the weapons-on-the-plane story at the time was that Ibrahim and his friends were not on their way to do anything sinister. They were simply flying across Nigeria to get to a party. That is, moving around with lots of weapons was just simply how they rolled. Ibrahim was the dominant Abacha child who threw his weight around as the First Son and partied hard using state resources.

Obasanjo simply had too many children as President for any one of them to be similarly dominant and at any rate, he was the one who dominated his children. Umaru Yar’Adua only had older female children, and the goal was simply to marry them off to as many governors as possible while he was President. He did have 4 young sons at the time he was President. Goodluck Jonathan’s children were in their teens while he was in office and Yusuf Buhari, was the 7th of Buhari’s 10 children and the only surviving son. He also had that terrible motorbike accident in 2017 which came with speech damage and a lengthy recovery period.

All of this is to say that Seyi Tinubu — as the President’s oldest (surviving) son and the closest to him of his children with a very public profile — is going to be a ‘new’ experience for a lot of Nigerians who were too young to remember the Ibrahim Abacha days or the Mohammed Babangida days before that.

The First Son is back and I suspect this Bloomberg story is merely the first of many stories like it that will feature him during his father’s presidency.