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Claim: Social media users claimed President Tinubu wrote letters to the UN Secretary-General and the US President, asking them not to release FBI files on alleged narcotics and other cases.
Verdict: False. DUBAWA discovered the letters are fabricated. Digital forensic analysis of the letters, along with checks with the Nigerian Presidency, show the documents are fake.
Full Text
The United States District Court for the District of Columbia is handling a civil Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for US law enforcement records from the late 1980s and early 1990s that mention Nigerian President Bola Tinubu.
A US transparency activist and founder of PlainSite, Aaron Greenspan, initiated the litigation by requesting file records from six federal agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Executive Office of United States Attorneys (EOUSA), United States Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Amid public interest in the court proceedings, social media users began sharing letters that President Tinubu purportedly wrote and sent to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and United States President Donald Trump. President Tinubu is alleged to have pleaded with them to stop the release of files linking him to historical drug investigations and the deaths of Moshood Abiola and Sani Abacha.
One of the letters posted on Facebook (archived here) and addressed to Guterres reads in part, “In view of the strong and enduring partnership between Nigeria, the United Nations and the United States, I respectfully appeal to you, Your Excellency, to kindly use your good offices to engage with the Government of the United States, and in particular, President Donald J. Trump, to consider intervening in the matter and facilitating the cancellation or closure of the said case.”
As of Sept. 24, 2026, the post had gathered 362 reactions, 75 comments, and 34 shares.
In a similar vein, another document surfaced on X (archived here) addressed to the US President, titled “The Release of My FBI Case Must Be Handled with Caution,” appealing to American authorities to exercise restraint and withhold the records.
The letters were also reshared across social media, as seen here, here, here, and here.
Several users on these platforms responded to the letters in different ways.
Farouk-Jibrin Okpanachi commented, “The Heading says it all. He has admitted that he has a drug case in Chicago.”
Another user, Jezreel Abu, wrote, “Go and beg face to face; UNGA is ongoing.”
“This letter is obviously fake,” jamesagada (@jamesagada) asserted.
Because the claim involves international diplomacy, high-profile legal proceedings, and sensitive national figures, DUBAWA fact-checked it.
Verification
DUBAWA conducted keyword searches across Google, the Nigerian presidency’s verified X handle, and national news archives. The search found no news organisation reporting that President Tinubu transmitted such letters to the United Nations or the United States government.
DUBAWA manually reviewed the letters and found different designs and formatting discrepancies.
The documents feature an unofficial emblem that consists of Tinubu’s portrait, the national coat of arms, and bold typography. This is different from the official letterhead and stationery used for State House correspondence. Moreover, the signature appended to the letters does not match Tinubu’s official signature appended to presidential messages.
Furthermore, through formal court filings, President Tinubu’s legal counsel has submitted legal arguments concerning statutory exemptions, not through personal letters to foreign offices.
DUBAWA subjected both letters to digital forensic analysis using the InVID-WeVerify verification tool.
The tool identified evidence indicating that the letter to the UN Secretary-General was synthetic. It found 88 per cent of the letter to be AI-generated.
For the letter addressed to the US President, InVID-WeVerify returned an inconclusive result with weak indicators of synthetic generation.
However, isFake.ai, an AI detector for text and image forensics, flagged the letter to the US President as probably AI-generated, pointing to synthetic text rendering.
DUBAWA also contacted the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Public Enlightenment, Abdulaziz Abdulaziz, who dismissed the letters as fake.
“These are fake; the first wrong indicator is the letterhead,” he said, while urging the public to disregard them.
Conclusion
The claim that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu wrote letters to the UN Secretary-General and the US President pleading against the release of FBI files is false.