Muddled
President Bola Tinubu has requested that a United States District Judge, Nancy Maldonado, direct Chicago State University to protect his…
President Bola Tinubu has requested that a United States District Judge, Nancy Maldonado, direct Chicago State University to protect his confidential information, including admission records, transcripts and gender while releasing only his certificate to the legal team of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. Tinubu’s lawyer, Christopher Carmichael, argued that the most crucial information had already been established by Tinubu’s alma mater. Atiku had previously obtained an order from US magistrate Jeffrey Gilbert, compelling CSU to provide Tinubu’s academic records, including admission details, attendance dates, degrees, awards, and honours.
The legal battle that has dogged Tinubu’s candidacy in this year’s presidential election is just a highlight of how contentious and fractious the polls have been at a national and personal level — a blight on the integrity of the person who occupies the most important office in the land. The investigative journalist David Hundeyin’s published findings on Tinubu’s identity have raised serious questions about Tinubu’s legitimacy and threaten to complicate nascent efforts at achieving national security. Tinubu’s false identity, if true, can compromise Nigeria’s foreign and security interests. If Tinubu came to power using a questionable identity that is protected by a foreign power through legal means, it raises the possibility that Nigeria’s foreign and security interests could be directed by that power. In other words, Tinubu could become “an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him” — the archetype of the abstract character Irish playwright Oscar Wilde warned about in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Nigerian politics may not be explicit on the point but a lot of policy development and implementation depend on legitimacy. Tinubu has struggled with his policy over the Niger coup because large and important sections of the country do not see him as legitimate and therefore stand ready to oppose his policies. What his legal troubles in Chicago provide is ready ammunition that could be deployed to scuttle policy actions at a time when bold and imaginative leadership is needed. The next four years would be quite the ride and not for the right reasons.