Certifiers Without Certificates -By Kene Obiezu

Another day in Nigeria, another crisis of certification and a veritable crucible of chaos for certainty.

Uche Nnaji is the latest high-ranking Nigerian official to have his political head chopped off by the cleaver of certificate crisis. In a country where data is at best doubtful and records extremely rusty, the question is how many more would possibly be found out if an uncompromising audit were conducted?

For many years, a degree from UNN, one of Nigeria’s premier universities, decorated the staggering résumé of Uche Nnaji, Nigeria’s former minister for science and technology, until it became a cog for contest in Nigeria’s treacherous political waters. Once the lines between the hallowed groves of the academe and the chilly colosseum of politics were blurred with a senior officer of the university moving in to land the killer blow, it was clear that a loser was about to be christened.

The former minister has since resigned, and despite the Pilate-like manner in which the Enugu State government has washed its hands of his ordeal and for all the whispers of inordinate ambition proving to be a bridge too far, it is clear that a crisis of certification is upon Nigeria. With it is a crisis of certainty, certitude, and integrity. It is a crisis as deadly as it is infectious. Its potency lies in the fact that its plot twists to the fish rotting from the head.

In 2023, as President Bola Ahmed Tinubu stood on the cusp of history, poised to clinch the prize of Nigeria’s sixteenth president, his detractors, critics, and even neutrals alike found a common cause: a certificate allegedly obtained from the Chicago State University.

The President and his defenders stood on extremely shaky ground when they were called upon to explain the discrepancies. They largely rambled even as efforts to disqualify him expectedly floundered in a country where even some judicial officers have been known to forge certificates.

Those who forge certificates or any other documents for that matter should be seen nowhere near Nigeria’s corridors of power if a slumbering, stuttering country is ever to make appreciable progress. This is because they represent the worst class of cheats and liars, those who would manipulate the written word to confer an unearned, unjust and undue advantage and go a step further to peg it with permanence. They pose indescribable danger to a country already embroiled in a crisis of identity and integrity.

When they get into office, they would have no qualms mutilating figures to fritter away Nigeria’s commonwealth; they would have absolutely no compunction altering documents to mount their unqualified cronies in strategic government offices; they would forge and pad budgets, smuggle stuff into memos and other correspondence, and do a lot of damage to what is a broken system. Nigeria’s deplorable reading culture also plays handsomely into their hands.

The fear is that already they have infiltrated the system. With the chaos, Nigeria is institutionally a disastrous reflection of an asylum governed by lunatics.

For every certificate exposed in Nigeria as forged or fake, there are at least a thousand more. The question is who would weed them out and wheel those who parade and peddle them into the arms of the law.
The Nigerian society Itself seems resistant to credibility and integrity. In a country where the leadership is fogged by allegations of forgery, it is no surprise that forgery is a rampant rot.

Before the flames of forgery, which flare up from the fiendish furnace of fraud, engulf Nigeria’s children, who represent an increasingly fragile future, may a beleaguered country find the fibre to resist those who would eventually forge its demise.

A classic description of a country in crisis is one in which those who are supposed to certify others have no certificates themselves.

Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com