Calling Nigeria from the United States last Thursday was fraught. Practically no one I was trying to reach was responding.
Some were surfing the Internet for the latest tidbit on how the Atiku Abubakar’s petition against President Bola Tinubu’s victory in the February 25 election was playing out in federal court in the Windy City more than 9, 600 miles away, and were determined to tune out any distraction.
A good many were glued to foreign television news providers that have as their unique selling proposition the transmission of Breaking News, as opposed to news that is ferreted out. That genre, I gather, belongs in the bad old pre-digital age.
Those who could not afford that luxury stayed tuned to the local television stations that serve as proxies for foreign outlets, complete with thumping, throbbing music and scary graphics suggestive of world-altering situations, marked by chaos, and violence.
Remember the “twilight of the gods”. I will spare you the Germanic name for a medieval precursor of the genre, but if you are a glutton for punishment and insist on my invoking it, here goes: gotterdammerung. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
As I was saying, it was almost as if the future of Tinubu’s presidency, no less than the destiny of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the world’s largest Black nation was hanging precariously on whatever ruling was handed down from that court house in Chicago.
At issue was whether Tinubu had truly earned a degree in Accounting from Chicago State University, as he had indicated in election filings going back to 1999 when he first ran for Governor of Lagos State, or he had been using another person’s identity and credentials to advance his political fortunes, at the expense of candidates who had duly complied with all the rules and regulations.
It is not a new issue.
The departed legal gadfly and sworn enemy of humbug, Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, had set out to have Tinubu’s victory in the 1999 election voided on the grounds that Tinubu did not have the qualifications detailed in his filing, nor did he attend the schools listed therein.
Tinubu’s response was that the application had been filed by his NADECO collaborator Tokunbo Afikuyomi without the benefit of the pertinent documents that Tinubu was not in a position to provide, being holed up in forced exile in the United States.
More concretely, Tinubu latched on to the constitutional clause that gave him legal immunity as an elected state governor.
But since then, the matter has followed his every political move like a shadow. And there it was, more menacing than ever when he made his biggest political move career, declaring that it had been his ambition since childhood to serve as President, and that the time had come.
His “Emi lo kan,” or “It is my turn” declaration at a difficult time in his campaign for the APC ticket left no one in any doubt that his resolve was unshakeable, despite indications and dark whispers that he was in poor health.
At first, what loomed as the most formidable obstacle in his path was settling for a fellow Muslim as his running mate. They said it was a plan to “islamize Nigeria, when the man couldn’t even “islamize” his own wife, a pastor in the Redeemed Church of God.
The run- up to the nomination was mired in the sterile debate over that binary issue until Professor Wale Adebanwi, dean of Africana at the Ivy-League University of Philadelphia entered what will go down as the definitive essay on factors governing Tinubu’s motivations, the choices and the calculations that Tinubu must have made far removed from all the noise in the public sphere.
The manufactured controversy fizzled. Had MKO Abiola not chosen Babagana Kingibe, a fellow Muslim as his running mate in the 1993 presidential election, and had the duo not an emphatic victory that was annulled by a military regime that wanted to stay put. And had not Atiku Abubakar, a Muslim, reportedly sought to be on Abiola’s ticket in place of Kingibe?
Tinubu’s opponents would reopen questions about Tinubu’s antecedents with ferocity when Atiku lost to Tinubu in the 2023 presidential election.
Atiku was the architect of his own loss. By the PDP’s rules, its national chair and its presidential candidate cannot belong in the same geopolitical zone. But the national chair, Iyorchia Ayu, and Atiku, its presidential candidate. belonged in the same zone.
Atiku turned deaf ears to petitions to repair this breach. As a result, five state governors elected on his party’s platform – the so-called Group of Five, or G5 – led by the combustible Nyesom Wike, broke ranks with Atiku, thus severely eroding Atiku’s support in their domains.
Without the split, Atiku could conceivably have won the presidential election,
The defeat rankled. Atiku blames it on Tinubu, whom he has accused of engineering the split, and pursuing it to the point of no return. His petition before the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal having been found lacking in merit, Atiku shifted gears.
He would frontload his appeal to the Supreme Court with what he had been assured would constitute assailable evidence that the diploma Tinubu said he obtained from Chicago State University and the documents with which he had secured admission to that institution were blatant forgeries.
In the run-up to the Supreme Court’s ruling on his appeal, Atiku has pursued the quest for such materials with an intensity bordering on monomania. It was in anticipation of the release of the documents by Chicago State as ordered by a federal court that the nation held its collective breath last Thursday.
Schadenfreude wafted through the camps of the anti-Tinubu coalition. Their bogeyman was about to be brought down and taken out of contention, or so they hoped. Team Tinubu was reckoning that, ultimately, what would really matter was what Nigerian courts have decided or will decide, based on their interpretation of Nigerian laws governing an issue that belongs indisputably in its jurisdiction.
When it landed, the Chicago Verdict was neither the knockout punch, the evisceration of Tinubu that the coalition of his adversaries confidently expected, nor the complete vindication that Team Tinubu would have welcomed.
Chicago State released some dodgy application material from Tinubu’s file, to wit: a transfer transcript from Richard Daley College, with a name and gender different from Tinubu’s, and an attestation purportedly from Government College, Lagos, which had not been established at the time Tinubu sought admission.
But it confirmed that the Bola Ahmed Tinubu, male, who sat the entrance examination to the institution, enrolled in the Accounting programme and was graduated with distinction, is one and the same person as the current President of Nigeria.
Chicago State said the diploma filed with his election documents did not emanate from its provenance. So that, even if it is a forgery, it does not materially detract from his status as a graduate in good standing.
The most judicious construction on the merit of Atiku’s case at this time has to be the Scotch Verdict: Not proven.
But proven or not proven, Atiku is not about to change course. Rather, he seems set to change tactics. He plans to turn a constitutional issue into a moral crusade against the Tinubu Presidency, which he hopes will resonate across the country.
Its effect will be to distract the Administration, to keep it so busy fending off attacks on its legitimacy that it would have little time to pursue the policies, programmes and plans on which it was voted into power.
-To be sure, Tinubu is no saint. None among us is. Saints are anointed, not elected. In whatever case, no election in Nigeria has ever produced a saint. And it is neither here nor there to insist that the Wazirin Adamawa is singularly unsuited to lead a moral crusade in Nigeria.
The question is: Where is all this leading, and how will it end?
Nigerians must devoutly hope and pray that politics will yield to statesmanship before it is too late. Atiku served Nigeria to the best of his ability as vice president, and may still, in the fullness of time, serve again in the higher office of President.
