By Festus Adedayo
In all this, I am at a loss. Methinks somebody proud enough to grant interviews articulating his academic brilliance should have no issue at all mounting his First-Class certificate on global billboards for all to see. That done, political enemies like Atiku Abubakar would have had no other option than to lick their wounds.
When Chief Obafemi Awolowo died in 1987, amid a deluge of musical tributes in his honour, a line among those offerings stood out, evergreen. Sang by Fuji music lord, Kollington Ayinla, while extolling Awolowo’s panegyrics, he sang: “ookan ile l’osa gbe, Baba Yinka//eyin t’o funfun kii gbe koro enu.” This line profoundly articulated the open life of Awolowo, as well as his trackable history and pedigree. As short as the lines were, they drilled deep into the most granular of Yoruba’s concept of openness and transparency. Literally translated, it means that shrines that a people are proud of are erected in open family compounds and, it is a misnomer to cover a set of sparklingly white teeth with flabby duvet of lips.
Shrines in Africa were held, partially or wholly, as reserved places for magico–religious or even ceremonial functions. Their traditional worshippers or priests consider them sacred and as groves where ancestors lived. Those groves were also places and channels of communication with humans by the gods and were dedicated to the worship of deities, war heroes believed to have transformed into ancestors, or sites of burial of nobles in a community. Trees, water and rocks are wrapped round these shrines and altars and they together form an important totem of the environment, corpus of the Yoruba belief system. As important as these shrines are, most Yoruba deities and shrines are erected in the front of compounds.
So, whether as Christians, Muslims or animists, there is a unity of prayer points of parents that God should give them blessings that cannot be hidden. One of such blessings is that the children on whom they spend so hugely, excel upon graduation, especially with a first class. Every week, newspapers celebrate such achievements in interviews with such graduates. Those are blessings that cannot be hidden. In support of full disclosure of a worthy past, Yoruba say that only a malformed or deformed hand is hidden under the bowels of a garment – “owo ti o sunwon ni gbe abe aso.”
On Sunday, October 17, 2021, TheNews magazine published what it said was the “Most Comprehensive Tinubu interview about his early life, struggles abroad, against military, governorship, others,” a “a marathon interview he granted” where he “spoke about his rugged beginnings, studies in the US, struggles against the military for the actualization of June 12, the current democracy and others.” In the interview, the man who would later become the Nigerian president said he performed so brilliantly at the Chicago State University (CSU) so much that, “at the end of the term, and still on the Dean’s list, Professor Jesse came around to inform me that he would employ me to manage the Accounting laboratory for the institution… I was given a scholarship to become a tutor…I was challenged and severely under pressure to keep up the grade as each semester rolled by, because if my grades should drop, I would lose the scholarship. It was quite challenging and in the end, I graduated top of my class and I was recruited as an Accounting major…I was on the Dean’s list; I was in line for the award for the overall best accounting student as well as that of the university scholar’s award….”
Recently, in a September 7, 2023 press release from Aso Rock, on the fringe of the G-20 Summit, during an interactive session with Nigerian students studying in the South Asian country, President Tinubu recalled his academic prowess while he was an undergraduate at the Chicago State University, describing himself as a brilliant student. “Good education brought me here and I am happy to stand before you here as the President of Nigeria. I started small. I was a security guard. I was a tutor in school. I was a brilliant student. I joined Deloitte and was trained by one of the biggest accounting firms in the world, because of my education.”
Those are indeed words of encouragement. His grass to grace story should encourage any youth that they too could reach for the zenith of achievements in life if a US cab driver could become the president of the most populous Black country in the world. So when, shortly before the judgment of the Presidential Election Petitions Committee, ex-Vice President Atiku Abubakar was rumoured to have approached a United States of America court to subpoena CSU so as to obtain university schooling records of President Tinubu, many of us laughed him to scorn. Why would Atiku take politics to this demeaning level? We reckoned that Atiku would be so legally gas-lighted in the US that he would not try this nonsense again all his political life.
In the application, Atiku had alleged that Tinubu’s academic records were inconsistent. In a dramatic way that stunned virtually all of us, the American court granted Atiku’s application through a judgment it delivered last Tuesday, September 6, by magistrate Jeffrey Gilbert. He then ordered the production of the school documents of Tinubu in 48 hours and deposition of the administrators of the CSU under oath. If granted, Atiku sought to demonstrate that the man who occupies Nigeria’s foremost office was nothing other than a criminal forger who was ineligible to be president of a country like ours. As Professor Olatunji Dare once wrote in his profound mastery of the English language, this was becoming curiouser and curiouser. Atiku’s reliance was on sections of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) which unambiguously voids the aspirations of anyone who willfully tampers with their certificates for the sake of vying for political office.
Both Tinubu and his alleged alma mater, the CSU, have maintained that he attended the institution. CSU is however demurring from authenticating his certificate under oath. The man who in newspaper interviews excitedly mouthed his first class degree at CSU is also now spiritedly arguing against the release of the results to Atiku. His argument became the untenability of the documents in Atiku’s appeal at the Supreme Court. The former Vice president was however unwavering. Before the order could lapse, Tinubu suddenly approached the court under a Ms Nancy Maldonado of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago, for an application to delay the order and submitted that releasing his school documents to Atiku had a fatal potential to damage his life. “Severe and irreparable harm will be done to Bola Tinubu if the records are released,” the president’s lawyer told Maldonado. Arguing further, the lawyer said that if the court released the documents to Atiku, great harm that “cannot be taken back to the bottle” would be done on him. Immediately, Ms. Maldonado agreed with Tinubu’s lawyer on the severity of granting the order on the part of Tinubu and thus stayed the order pending further arguments on the matter.
In all this, I am at a loss. Methinks somebody proud enough to grant interviews articulating his academic brilliance should have no issue at all mounting his First-Class certificate on global billboards for all to see. That done, political enemies like Atiku Abubakar would have had no other option than to lick their wounds.
The Chicago court drama reminds me of one of Joseph Folahan (JF) Odunjo’s folklores with the title, Afose d’elede – Afose has morphed into a pig. Literary critics and folklorists say that the past and the present inter-relate in a strong way. Writer, educator and politician who was best known for his works in Yoruba children’s literature, Odunjo, in 1951, won a seat to the Western House of Assembly and was later appointed Western Region’s first minister of Land and Labour by Chief Awolowo. He communicated Yoruba values through folklores and myths. Folklore, a strong imprint from our past, relates strongly to present social and sociological conditions. Odunjo, just like D.O. Fagunwa, was greatly respected for having shaped the minds of generations of Yoruba of western Nigeria, especially through his highly famous Alawiye series. The series transformed into book form the oral folklore and stories of traditional society told at moonlight after dinner. With this, he was able to communicate values, beliefs and literary skills of the people. Using fictive characters (human or non-human) like tortoise (Ijapa and his wife, Yannibo), ghomids, (ebora) streams, animal kingdom, human kingdom, etc, he intermixed itan (myths) and alo (folklores), the former more believable because they are factual, dependable and historical than myths, to convey the reality of the time. The calamity in this however is that such folklores have not been preserved into posterity like Tom and Jerry.
Festus Adedayo is a Public Policy Analyst.
