David Hundeyin, a top Nigerian investigative journalist, has asked Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo not to let the Nigerian government take him back to Nigeria.
Hundeyin, who is currently in asylum in Ghana, made the request in a video that he posted on his X account, which used to be Twitter, on Wednesday night.
Before the general elections in 2023, the writer wrote an article called “Bola Ahmed Tinubu: From Drug Lord to Presidential Candidate” about Bola Tinubu, who was then the leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and is now the president.
In the new video, Hundeyin says that the Nigerian government is after him because he leaked a secret document about the plan of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to attack the Niger Republic.
He said, “I left Nigeria in 2020 and asked for refuge in Ghana at the beginning of 2021. In May 2022, Ghana gave me refugee status, and they also gave me a Ghanaian refugee passport, which I have used a lot to travel all over Africa and the rest of the world.
“Last month, when those in the ECOWAS bloc who wanted to go to war against the coup government in Niger kept going back and forth, something happened.
“Bola Tinubu, the president of Nigeria, made a move to send Nigerian Special Forces illegally into Nigerian territory to establish a “no fly zone.” This is a fancy way of saying that he launched an unprovoked military attack against an independent, sovereign country that is friendly to Nigeria.
“As assumed, most people in the Nigerian government, military, and general population didn’t agree with this at all. But it was clear that Tinubu was eager to start this war with Niger, which no one wanted.
“After that, someone gave me a secret document that basically had attack orders on it. Basically, we are making plans for this illegal attack on Niger. And I knew that by putting these papers out there, I might be able to stop the terrible attack that would kill a lot of people in West Africa for no reason. So I did that exact thing.
“I sent out these papers in early August, and they did what I wanted them to do. The invasion was stopped because of it. Then, Tinubu tried to get the Nigerian Senate’s permission to send the Nigerian troops to Niger. This idea was shot down by the Senate, and for all intents and purposes, the attack never happened.
“It would have been a disaster, and no one would have gotten anything out of it except the President.
“Now, after I leaked this paper, I heard from several sources that the Nigerian military and intelligence agencies were very angry with me. Since a long time ago, people have been interested in me. But because of that, I was called something like an enemy of states.
“Whether it was good luck or bad luck, just a month before this happened… Because I travel with a Ghanaian passport, I was exposed to the public after an unfortunate event in Zimbabwe. The permanent secretary at the Zimbabwean Ministry of Information, probably thinking he was getting back at some foreign journalists, tweeted to a global audience that I had claimed asylum in Ghana. Because of this, people in power in Nigeria knew who to talk to if they wanted to get in touch.
“So, I was told that the Nigerian intelligence agency—I’m not sure if it was the National Intelligence Agency or the Defense Intelligence Agency—had found out that I had been spying on them. But one of these foreign spy agencies sent a plane to Accra to basically get me sent to Nigeria against the law.
“It seems like they wrote a letter to the Ghanaian government accusing me of treason and helping terrorism by supposedly telling terrorists where troops were.
“It seemed like that was the end of the story. I just found out lately that the Tinubu government is still trying very hard to do some kind of illegal rendition. The latest plan seems to be to put pressure on the Ghanaian government. I was accused of sabotaging that ECOWAS mission and, by doing so, putting the security of the ECOWAS bloc at risk. If this is true, Ghana, which is also a member of ECOWAS, would have to cancel my asylum, take away my refugee status, and take away my Ghanaian passport.
“The Nigerian documents hope that if my passports are taken away, any travel rights, visa privileges, or residency privileges I have anywhere in the world will be taken away as well. Because of this, it will be easier for them to use the different options open to a nation-state to get someone extradited or illegally handed over.
He told President Akufo-Addo, “I want to urge the Ghanaian president not to give in to the desire of letting an unconstitutional Nigerian president force Ghana to break international law. There is a law that says it is against the law to send political refugees back to the country they left because they will be persecuted there.
“Everyone knows that if I were to be sent back to Nigeria for any reason, I wouldn’t make it. This is nothing new.”He said.