Tinubu’s Certificate Saga And The Tragedy Of Normlessness

Finally, the Chicago State University (CSU) released the academic records of President Bola Tinubu marking the climax of a saga that predates even the politics of the 2023 presidential election. The bone of contention has been the authenticity of the CSU certificate presented to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) by Tinubu. The revelations from the released documents indicate that the replacement copy submitted to the electoral body by Tinubu is forged. Furthermore, the transcript of Southwest College with which the President secured admission to the CSU indicates that the owner is a female, which is suggestive of identity theft by Tinubu. Similarly, the records show that Tinubu claimed that he finished from Government College, Lagos, in 1970, whereas the school was only established in 1974.

The foregoing has generated so much controversy which also has some political colouration as supporters of Tinubu and those who oppose him try to explain the unfolding events in ways that only pander to their predilections. One thing, however, appears certain: there is something dishonest about President Tinubu’s past, otherwise why would he bother in the first place to oppose any move to release his records? One expects that a public figure whose adversaries are bent on unjustly destroying his integrity will simply respond by personally releasing the records to shame these adversaries and expose them for idle and scheming meddlers they are. But Tinubu stoutly resisted any move to bring his credentials to the public domain. He surely has a skeleton in his cupboard.

I agree with the conclusion of Prof. Farooq Kperogi that Tinubu did indeed attend the CSU but that he had, for any reason, forged a replacement certificate after he lost the original. Similarly, there is something fraudulent about the records he presented to gain admission into the CSU, which tends to give credence to allegations of false identity and age falsification against him which have since been in the public domain.

However, the most important thing at this stage is what follows after these revelations; what will happen to President Tinubu whose integrity has come under so much public scrutiny? It is saddening that to see the resolution of this saga, we would have to wait for the Supreme Court to litigate on the technicalities of admissibility of fresh evidence in a matter that has gone to the appellate level of litigation. Yes, this is saddening as the present matter, given its symbolic and practical implication for the destiny of over 200 million human beings, ought to be beyond legalism. If this is not so, then we are doomed as a people.

Permit me to digress a little to philosophy of law to elucidate this point. The laws of modern states are principally based on the Positivist School of Jurisprudence where the law draws its life and legitimacy from the positive action of the political authority (the legislature). In other words, the law is law only because it has been made a law by the political authority, irrespective of whether what is legislated contradicts any other sentiments be it of moral, religious, cultural, economic or whatever nature. Thus, for instance, if one who has a truck-load of food, stands and watches another person die of hunger instead of offering him a little from the surplus to eat and live, he has committed no offence under the positivist law, just as the person who has surplus money and chooses to buy what he does not need and throwing them into the River Niger rather than offering it to a poor who needs it to cure a life-threatening illness has not defaulted in obligation to the poor man simply because the positive law has not imposed any such obligation on him.

However, adherents of the Naturalist School of Jurisprudence such as St. Thomas Aquinas would have the law founded, not on whatever the political authority decides to promulgate, but on the natural law with its constituents of love, compassion, fairness, justice, duty, moderation, decency and all such moral values that would ensure that a rich man who watches the poor die of hunger becomes an offender liable to be punished under the law. On the contrary, the positivist legal system that operates in all modern states does not rely on morality and scruples for its validation.

Despite all the arguments as may be advanced by adherents of the Positivist Theory of Law to prove its aptness, it is very obvious that the law as founded on this philosophy is quite inadequate for healthy functioning of human society. Consequently, humans have, while operating the positive law, sought to make up for its deficiency through an informal system of motivations and sanctions that compels compliance to those moral values which the law and its institutions of enforcement may fall short of safeguarding. The motivations would include awards and recognitions such as the Nobel Prize for Peace given to Mother Teresa for her heroic acts of love for humanity even though she would have broken no formal law if she had decided not to do what she did, while the sanctions would include public shaming and stigmatization such as seen when a politician is publicly criticized for not fulfilling his election promises despite that he may have had only a moral (and not legal) obligation to fulfil them.

This informal system of motivations and sanctions constitutes an important part of a society’s reward system which crucially complements the formal institutions such as the law, the courts and the prisons. It is this informal system that ensured that a British Minister for War Affairs resigned his position after he was pictured coming out of a brothel. He had broken no law, he only ran afoul of the high standard of decency and exemplarity expected of a public officer of his standing. It was this same system that forced British Interior Minister, Amber Rudd, to quit in 2018 for giving misleading information to the Parliament regarding a government policy on deportation of migrants. She did not commit perjury because the information was not given on oath; she may have only faltered on the part of truth and morality, assuming, contrary to her claims of error, she had deliberately given wrong information. The same scenario played out last year when British Parliamentarian, Mr. Neil Parish, resigned for being caught watching pornography. Pornography viewing is not a crime in UK. Many of us may not have forgotten how Susan Rice, then US ambassador to UN, was forced to withdraw her candidature for the position of the Secretary of State after President Obama had penciled down her name for the exalted office. Ms. Rice’s offence was her statement that the attacks that killed four American diplomats in the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, was a mere spontaneous act by some protesting Moslems as against being a premeditated terrorist attack. However, when intelligence reports emerged later showing that the attack was indeed a coordinated terrorist act by a group linked to al-Qaeda, Rice had to offer to be dropped as a nominee for the office of the Secretary of State. She broke no law, but again this same informal, non-legal system of reward and sanction which is characteristically active in a healthy society like America has, through severe criticism and public shaming, forced her to admit that her conduct was not befitting of one to assume the hallowed and sensitive position of America’s chief diplomat. Her offence was merely being reckless; she failed to apply due diligence in making comments on a very sensitive issue of national interest by getting all her facts on the table before talking.

Therefore, when we have to wait for the Supreme Court to navigate us through the web of legal technicalities to resolve a certificate forgery, age and identity falsification scandal involving our number one citizen, then something is definitely wrong with our system! Already, there are arguments, especially coming from the APC side, that all the documents secured from the US by Atiku will come to naught within the context of the election petition before the Supreme Court on the ground of their inadmissibility having not be pleaded and tendered at the court of first instance – the PEPC. I have also heard the argument that what Tinubu did with the CSU certificate he submitted to INEC does not constitute forgery under the US law given that university certificates are not proof of academic degree in the country but a mere ceremonial object just like the graduation gown. While there are chances that all these technicalities may, rightly or wrongly, give Tinubu an escape route at the Supreme Court, the fact that we have to get to that level is a clear symptom of a dysfunctional society. In sane climes, the informal, non-legal mechanisms of reward, which nurtures no technicalities, would have since taken care of the matter, even sparing us the burden of having, in the first place, a man with such a huge legal and moral baggage as Tinubu being among our presidential candidates. History is replete with many instances where scandals forced top contenders to withdraw from electoral races. Gary Hart, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential ticket for the US 1988 election, had to quit the race a year earlier when his extramarital affair with a woman named Donna Rice was exposed by the press. Extramarital affairs arent a crime in the US.

However, many people, including PDP supporters, have called on Tinubu to honourably resign. Some optimistic posts began to circulate on social media about Tinubu’s imminent resignation when the CSU was being awaited to release his records as ordered by the court. I had a good laugh at such wild optimism that is completely out of tune with what we are used to and whom we are – a normless society. We are not a principled people, rather we only get intoxicated by the buzz and emotions of the moment as represented by the current situation.

If we are really true to the values we are now appealing to, we would not, in the first place, even have a character like Atiku as a presidential hopeful and now a legal and moral advocate. Here is a man whose past ought to have condemned to the same fate of historical ostracization as now being prescribed for Tinubu. He lacks any moral locus to assume the role he is playing now given his part in frustrating the evolution of an informal system of reward and sanction that would have ensured that the sanity and honour he is now prescribing becomes our reality. His involvement in a shameful act of official corruption in what became known as the Halliburton scandal is still very recent history. And while the US had since jailed his accomplice in the person of Senator Williams Jefferson, this Nigerian collaborator has since then been contesting presidential elections and has always come very close to emerging as our President. Similarly, Atiku’s adventure as the Chairman of the Presidential Committee on COJA All Africa Games in 2003 can only be easily forgotten by a people as possessed by amnesia as us. TELL magazine, in a daring and penetrating investigative report, had exposed how this man, out of sheer greed, awarded double contracts (even at inflated costs) for procurement of media equipment for the games, including underwater cameras. The magazine had to re-print the edition in question with an apology to its readers who were deprived access to the publication the previous week when the initial copies it printed were ambushed and bought up by the authorities to ensure the news of the corruption never got to the public.

Atiku did not follow the path of honour (which he is now prescribing for Tinubu) to resign when he was being investigated by the EFCC for his alleged embezzlement in relation to the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF). Rather, he took refuge in the courts and ultimately got the Supreme Court to quash his indictment by an administrative panel of inquiry, paving way for his running for the 2007 presidential election on the platform of ACN as offered to him by Tinubu. Has he forgotten so soon this episode where he and Tinubu collaborated to impede the evolution of these same values he now wants to profit from? You cannot reap where you did not sow. It is now his turn to wait and watch as his erstwhile accomplice follow the same path of taking refuge in the technicalities and highly restricting standard of proof as found in the court.

Social values, including as they relate to the informal, non-legal systems of sanctions, do not fall like mana from heaven. They are rather a product of past efforts to nurture that component of a society’s soul; it crucially includes sacrificial and exemplary actions from leaders such as Atiku and Tinubu.

In the part 1 of my article 2023 Elections and Nigeria’s Journey to No Where published in this column on July 2, 2023, I made this same point while discussing the insincerity of politicians when they cry about election riggings. Politicians who, while in power, did nothing to evolve a culture of free and fair elections, will only be deluding themselves when they expect free and fair elections upon finding themselves in opposition. Regarding Atiku’s paradoxical fortune in the 2023 polls, I wrote: “I will not waste time talking about the fate of Atiku Abubakar, another supposed victim of the electoral malpractices in the last presidential polls. His was some sort of poetic justice. At the time he was the vice president and one of the strongmen of PDP, that party became synonymous with the sort of electoral fraud he is complaining about regarding the 2023 elections. Maybe the all-knowing karma has decided to pay them in their own coin. His erstwhile boss Obasanjo is merely being delusive when he sanctimoniously preaches to us about how to conduct free and fair elections knowing too well that he did not contribute his quota in building a culture of electoral transparency when he had the opportunity. Free and fair elections do not descend from the Mars; they are rather a product of deliberate, sincere and consistent institution building which over time will entrench a system that engenders probity and checks malpractice; a system that whips everyone into the line irrespective of your status as a ruling or opposition actor. So, pray where does Obasanjo want free and fair elections to fall from in 2023? The same question should be answered by many other politicians alleging rigging in those elections.”

However, all hope is not lost for Atiku and all of us. The Realist School of Jurisprudence represents another possible leeway out of our present quagmire. This school of thought appreciates the power of the courts to determine what the law is, as their interpretative powers afford them the leverage to determine how the laws promulgated by the legislature will actually operate in real situations. This scenario plays out mainly at the apex court level, where the jurists, freed from the encumbrances of the doctrine of STARE DECISIS, enjoy much greater freedom of interpretation. Thus, a legal realist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, famously declared that “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.” In other words, we may never know exactly what the law is until the court pronounces on them. This represents society’s one escape route out of the moral quagmire created by our positivist jurisprudence from time to time. Therefore, a lot of persons are rightly looking up to the Nigerian Supreme Court hoping that the unexpected happens!

Lastly, many people have been expressing sadness that Tinubu’s saga is bringing international disgrace to Nigeria. Again, I always laugh at this reasoning knowing that the civilized world often expect little from us; they are never ignorant of our normless culture which not only frowns at nothing but even encourages everything. They are aware that people who occupy public offices in our clime are often individuals with questionable past. For example, Paul Collier, a world-renowned British development economist, in his book, WARS, GUNS AND VOTES: DEMOCRACY IN DANGEROUS PLACES, noted that a major factor hindering growth among developing countries is the fact that their process of selecting leaders is almost completely devoid of norms. He thus observed that people with dishonourable and even scandalous pasts routinely succeed in becoming leaders in these countries, whereas these are the exact sort of pasts that make one a non-starter as an aspiring leader in the developed world. Evidence has proved this assertion beyond doubt.

But for now, lets mourn the fact that ours is a society deeply entrapped in a tragedy of normlessness,

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.