Bola Ahmed Tinubu: The Man That Never Was

…The pattern of discrepancies in Tinubu’s academic records and credentials are too impossible to ignore as this narrative suggests

By Mohammed Bello Doka

What happens when the only official record that bears a man’s name in the country where he claims to have built a career is not an employment letter, not a tax document, not a university transcript — but a court order for the forfeiture of drug money?

This is not hyperbole. It is not opposition propaganda. It is a question that the records themselves demand we ask. When a man claims to have worked for one of the most prestigious accounting firms in the world, and that firm responds with a formal letter stating, “We have no record of Bola Tinubu in our systems,” something is terribly wrong. When a man claims to have graduated from a secondary school that did not even exist until four years after his supposed graduation, something is terribly wrong. When a man submits academic records to a foreign university that list his gender as female and his date of birth as two years different from what he claims, something is terribly wrong. When the certificate he submits to Nigeria’s electoral commission bears a middle name that is not his own — “Adekunle” instead of “Ahmed” — something is terribly wrong.

And when all of these things are true of one man, the man who sits in Aso Rock as the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, then we are entitled to ask: who is Bola Ahmed Tinubu?

Let us begin with what he has told us about himself. In his 1999 affidavit to contest for the position of Governor of Lagos State, Tinubu stated that he worked at Arthur Andersen Accounting for years before joining Deloitte in 1983. In a 2016 interview with TheNews Magazine, he claimed he had a salary deposit of about $1.8 million while working with Deloitte and Touche. These were not casual boasts; they were sworn statements, submitted under oath to the institutions of this country.