Avoidable Distractions On The Political Trail, By Rotimi Fasan

When one observes the actions and utterances of Nigeria’s political actors, their habit of moving in circles, and the people’s preference for sensationalism over substance, it becomes clear why we are not making progress politically. We are back again where we were. We are in the campaign season, and the discourses of our engagement are hardly elevated. We keep repeating the same talking points and recycling the same arguments over and over again and wonder why things remain the same. After almost forty years since he first emerged as a political player on the national space, it is incredible that people and groups opposed to President Bola Tinubu cannot go beyond demanding that he tell them about his familial and academic background. They want to know the school he attended, his schoolmates, and from what loins he was spawned.

Important as all of this might be, they cannot be all there is to know about a human being, even if he had simply dropped from the skies. What should children who were abandoned at birth do? Let’s, for the sake of making a point, concede that there have been gaps in the information available in the public space about President Bola Tinubu. Does that necessarily wipe off the other things that have been established about his background? Must everyone be compelled to provide every bit of information about their life where there is enough to show that they did not just materialise from space? What is unheard of about self-fashioning or self-invention? Must every gap or new piece of information about an individual’s life have its origins in criminality? Aren’t there people who, for various reasons, no longer wish to be associated with a part of their past life or identity? Do they have an obligation to explain every bit of that to everyone?

There are people today who no longer bear their family names. Others exist who have chosen not to acknowledge their parents. What does that take away from them? It’s their right, whatever their reasons for this. Of what material benefit is knowing who President Bola Tinubu’s father is or the primary or secondary schools he attended to us, now that he has overcome whatever advantages or disadvantages that could have constituted? Even if we’ve not been told that is the case with him, aren’t there people who never knew their parents but have gone on to live very meaningful lives? Bill Clinton never met his father. Barack Obama was raised by his mother and grandmother. He only had to trace his Kenyan ancestry long after his father’s death. The manufactured controversy about his birthplace, religion, or race existed only for a time, and Americans moved beyond it. Friedrich Trump, as well as Donald, his son, who is the current president of America, hid his German ancestry for as long as it served his business interest. That has neither improved nor diminished Trump’s status or performance as president.

Bola Tinubu had a very prominent mother—indeed, one more prominent than the mothers of many of those who have been loudest about demanding details of his background. If he chooses to leave things at that, why should that and other questions of origin and educational qualifications be the major points of debate decades after he has become a major political figure? His bachelor’s degree already overrides any primary or post-primary qualifications, which is all the Nigerian Constitution demands of political contestants. Does the repeated demand for these not tell us something about those raising these questions rather than about Bola Tinubu himself? Whatever the gaps might be in President Bola Tinubu’s background, the point is that we know enough about him today to conclude that he is an accomplished Nigerian and a human being. We also know that he is educated enough to be the president of Nigeria, and evidence exists to prove this. Political opponents or even critics who are serious about defeating him and are offering an alternative blueprint of governance must learn to make do with what is available and has been validated by law without taking us back to the dead argument about his academic background. This has been scrutinised, forensically examined, and litigated home and abroad, and neither anything concrete nor useful has come out of it. The debate should move on to serious issues of governance.

Alhaji Atiku Abubakar only recently went on the same fishing expedition for the president’s records. That wasn’t the first time. He hired lawyers and lobbyists to the tune of 1.5 million American dollars to demand the release of so-called FBI papers and records on Tinubu, and nothing has come out of these efforts. The courts threw out his case less than a week ago. Now, a political upstart has jumped into the arena with confusing tales about Tinubu’s record. The man, Adetokunbo Pearse, is of the Peoples Democratic Party. To that extent, he can be considered a political ally of Atiku Abubakar. He has in the past been on television and other media platforms to criticise President Tinubu and the All Progressive Congress. He is a Lagosian, and in all the decades since Tinubu’s academic record has been a subject of debate, not for once has he disclosed that he knows anything or has something new to add to the controversy. Then, just days after Atiku’s legal challenge was defeated in the US, he comes up again with the tiring story that Bola Tinubu was never at Chicago State University.

How does Adetokunbo Pearse’s claim that he was a lecturer in the programme Tinubu graduated from prove that he has Tinubu’s academic records? His story, like the nature of his association with CSU, is doubtful in every particular. Not even in the face of multiple confirmations from that university that Bola Tinubu was there as a student would a harebrained tale such as Adetokunbo Pearse has to retail sell. His background in English studies could not have qualified him to be a lecturer in Business Administration or Accounting, as he tried to impress.

He arrived at CSU at least six years after Tinubu had graduated. If he was there, as he claims, between 1985 and 1990, what did he know of Tinubu’s future activity to have anticipated the controversy that came later with it and sourced ahead for his academic credentials? How did a man who was already a lecturer as far back as 1985 end up a Senior Lecturer at least two decades later in the Department of English at the University of Lagos? What was his rank at CSU? This man’s story is as confusing as he himself looked confused on the programme where he made his astounding claims. He is desperate for attention and should by now be satisfied with his moment in the sun.

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