Chicago State University. President Tinubu. Chicago State University. President Tinubu. There seems to be no end to the drip drip of scandal and the cacophony that follows on its grimy trail.
The labyrinthine saga of the multiple layers of the President’s identity and a doubtful pedigree reached their crescendo last week. Former Vice President and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, after fighting doggedly in an American Court to obtain the President’s academic records, addressed a press conference which was live-streamed on social media platforms.
In the aftermath, Lawyers and laymen alike, took to the media to vent their opinions even when the matter was before the Supreme Court and their opinions could prejudice and prejudge the adjudication of the dispute. This prompted an outraged former President of the Nigeria Bar Association(NBA), Olisa Agbakoba, to refer to the hubbub as “madness”, particularly on the part of the Lawyers who ought to know better, but were having a field day, commenting one way or the other, in a matter that was subjudice.
As a matter of fact, this absurd and bizarre theatre began in 1999. Chief Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who rode to the Governorship of Lagos on the crest of the National Democratic Coalition(NADECO), was dogged by identity, pedigree and certificate issues/crises. And no less a personage than Chief Gani Fawehinmi, the irrepressible and indefatigable human rights Lawyer and activist, put these allegations in the public domain. Further caustic innuendos were made by another human rights and pro-democracy activist, the late Yinka Odumakin, in March 2019.
On the aforementioned occasions, Chief Tinubu hardly rose in his own stout defense. Neither did he successfully refute the allegations. These allegations were resurrected, and with their resultant controversies, they suffused the party primaries, the campaigns and Chief Tinubu’s subsequent declaration as winner of the 2023 presidential election by the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC). As if to suggest doing the untoward was his leitmotif and part of his DNA, fake Cardinals and Bishops were hired to endorse the All Progressives Congress’s(APC’s ) Muslim-Muslim Presidential ticket a year ago.
Even though former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is not a paragon – having been once lacerated by his former principal, former President Olusegun Obasanjo – he must be commended for getting the academic records of the President. And even if his efforts do not eventually impress the Supreme Court, they expose two major lacunae in Tinubu’s checkered and convoluted genealogy. First, the certificate which the President presented to INEC was not the real/genuine one. Why would he do such a desperate thing? Second, the President falsely claimed to have graduated from a school which was founded four years later. Foundation students of the said school have since, clarionly and ignominiously, disclaimed the President.
Apart from these significant revelations, Atiku’s exertions rose to the high and exacting standards set by the Presidential Election Petition Court(PEPC), to wit: evidences adduced before Court in an election case must be specific rather than generic. Nothing, in my view could be more detailed, more graphic and more specific as Atiku’s onerous efforts.
Without prejudice to the case(s) in court, and with due and profound deference to the Supreme Court, the latest information procured by Atiku Abubakar, opens, not only a Pandora’s box, but peels yet another layer in Chief Tinubu’s putrid history. It also puts us in suspense and anticipation: What layer will be peeled next? What lurid detail will it betray or reveal?
Further to these cogent questions – and this should interest both rabid Tinubu supporters and his untiring traducers – is that the unending tale reveals, in bold relief, a man who pays scant regard for thoroughness and fastidiousness. If we were to subscribe to the tale hitherto bandied by his handlers about his preparation for the presidency, and to be guided by his vaulting ambition, canonized by his “this-is-my-turn” proclamation, one would have expected the president to sanitize his records since Chief Fawehinmi took him to the cleaners and back two decades ago. One would also have expected that failing an effort to put his records in order, he ought to have come clean by explaining the several gaps in his personal history. That he failed, and he failed resoundingly, to do these simple chores, demonstrates the scant regard he has for due process and the intelligence of Nigerians. His refusal to clean up or be forthright may also betray a careless or fatalistic streak. Or even hubris.
Whatever unfortunate or unflattering glimpses these failings proffer about the President, their larger implications cannot be lost to the discerning and patriotic. A man who takes Nigerians for granted, a man who is careless and slovenly and a man who is fatalistic will surely approach serious state matters and statecraft in the same vein. He can only give what he has. And as the Lawyers often say, you cannot give what you don’t have.
His inadequacies with regard to the aforementioned have manifested themselves for all to see in less than six months. Without any prior plan, he had withdrawn subsidy on petrol. He set the Naira on a free fall, even as the country’s foreign reserves(which should shore up the Naira) have been depleted. Meanwhile, the country lives from hand to mouth and Letters of Credit(LCs) are not being honored by exporters because there are no hard currencies to back them! Serious investors, in spite of a hugely devalued Naira as an attraction, have demurred and developed cold feet! PricewaterhouseCoopers(PwC) puts unsettled FX obligations to suppliers at $7billion.
Lest we falsely comfort ourselves, a man who cannot do an honest accounting of his pedigree and a man, bar a few persons of integrity, who surrounds himself with a cotorie and a concentric ring of charlatans with issues before anti-corruption agencies, cannot be counted to salvage a country which is at its lowest ebb and is keeping the rear in all departments.
Those who disagree with this thesis should kindly do a quick study of the recent inside story of Britain’s Boris Johnson by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell. Though the two authors attribute to Johnson a rare, exceptional capacity to communicate using “charisma and humor”, he was nonetheless characterized as possessed of “An all-consuming self-absorption and self-belief” and “A lack of moral seriousness not mitigated by his razor-sharp intellect and beguiling rhetorical skills”. The upshot of these failings were a scandal-prone administration and an overall mediocre performance.
Certainly, President Tinubu’s credentials pale in luminousness when compared to Johnson’s. Johnson attended the elite Eton and Oxford. The latter was ranked recently as the best university in the world. Tinubu has no charisma. Neither does he possess Johnson’s raw, infectious adrenaline. Worse than Johnson’s inanities are the many lurid stories and the probable and impending release of information regarding the President by the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI). Even as we wait, with foreboding and trepidation, we must pray fervently that it is not another Noriega phenomenon. Recall that Manuel Antonio Noriega was military ruler of Panama. Before then he was said to have long-standing ties with U.S intelligence. In 1988, however, Noriega who was said to have amassed a fortune from drug trafficking, was indicted in American courts for racketeering. Subsequently, Panama was invaded by America. Noriega was abducted and rendered to the US. He was tried and sentenced to forty years in prison.
While we pray that this should not be the President’s or Nigeria’s fate, we must ponder the consequences of a President who is so morally defective as to be liable to blackmail or for Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike to have serious doubts about anything he utters or does.
Certainly, these failings will frame, if not define the trajectory of a Tinubu presidency. The big question to ask in these circumstances is: Can a country of over two hundred million people, and in dire straits, afford to be led by a person who is a distraction to good governance and the butt of coarse jokes?
