Nigeria is facing an unprecedented moral crisis. At the heart of the imbroglio is the integrity of President Bola Tinubu and his educational qualification.
The crisis is one that has dogged the life of the president for over three decades and not even if the Supreme Court rules on the matter will the proprietary or otherwise of the many questions surrounding the person and history of President Tinubu will go away unless he comes clean on it himself.
The kernel of the matter is effort by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to “prove” that President Tinubu is not who he says he is especially pertaining to the academic laurel he parades.
Atiku was able in the United States to get deposition over a degree Tinubu obtained from the Chicago State University, CSU.
In the deposition, the university said President Tinubu did graduate from the university as he claimed, but were not categorical when asked if the certificate he (Tinubu) submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, was forged.
Added to the CSU deposition is the matter of the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, certificate of the president which bears Ädekunle” to it rather than “Ahmed” which the president has been known to bear.
At a presser last Thursday, the former VP and PDP presidential candidate in the 2023 election insists that the document which Tinubu submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, was fabricated, vowing not to back down from the case until the Supreme Court delivers its final judgement.
Atiku has gone ahead to make his point in a 20-paragraph affidavit deposed to in support of the appeal number: SC/CV/935/2023 with petition number: CA/PEPC/05/2023.
In affidavit deposed to by one Uyi Giwa-Osagie, a legal practitioner, Atiku argues that the certificate Tinubu presented to INEC in support of his qualification to contest the presidential election had been found not to be authentic by the Chicago State University, United States of America, which purportedly issued it.
However, Tinubu through his lawyer, Oluwole Afolabi, has described Atiku as being on a wild goose chase, even as the Presidency, weekend, lampooned him of “selling misinformation” in a bid to give “false hope” to his supporters.
The Presidency further accused the former vice president of trying to intimidate the judiciary by inciting the citizenry against judges.
“What Atiku is doing is simply misinformation out of desperation. He is selling a lie to galvanize his base. He is giving false hope to his funders and supporters.
“We know that he got support from different entities from within and outside Nigeria for his election and he gave them false hope that he was winning the election,” Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Temitope Ajayi, said.
In this back and forth, the blame lies squarely on President Tinubu who touted privacy laws as a basis for shielding his academic especially in CSU from public scrutiny.
Tinubu as a private individual is different from Tinubu as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. An occupant of such a high and prestigious office must be beyond reproach like Caesar’s wife, but unfortunately, that seems not to be the case here.
Whether Atiku is fishing for nothing and in the process bringing Nigeria to disrepute is akin to the Igbo proverb made popular by renowned novelist, Chinua Achebe, who said, a man who brings ant infested wood should not complain of the visit of lizards.
More to this macabre dance is the call in several quarters that all electoral matters be dispensed off with before there is swearing-in.
In a clime such as Nigeria where politics is zero-sum and occupants of high offices as powerful as the state if not more, there the urgency to review the constitutional provisions to create room for all pre and post-electoral challenges to be dispensed off with to avoid compromise by the judiciary.
This country’s democracy and fate are too important for judicial putsch on the basis of political expediency and cohesion.
The judiciary albeit the political class owe it as a scared duty to ensure that those who occupy political office and any other office for that matter are people of character, integrity and exemplary conduct. Anything less than this is to allow all sorts of shady characters and moral amputees to occupy offices they are unfit for.
If Nigeria must be the country it should be, then its leaders must not be tinged with any talk of forgery or character deficiency.
Enough is enough!
