By Ikechukwu Amaechi
IF there is
anything that the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC,
would want to die down at this critical moment, it is the certificate scandal
that has dogged his political career for more than two decades. Though he
survived the scandal when it first reared its ugly head in 1999 even as the
then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Salisu Buhari, accused of the
same scam, lost his plum office, it has refused to go away.
*Tinubu Tinubu survived the scandal then because the same gladiators who
forced Buhari to resign on July 22, 1999, exactly 49 days after he clinched the
coveted seat of the House of Representatives Speaker, turned around to save his
neck from the political guillotine.
And what was the case against Tinubu?
Like
Salisu Buhari who claimed to have attended University of Toronto in Canada and
graduated with a degree in Business Administration, when he did not, shortly
after he was sworn in as governor of Lagos State on May 29, 1999, there were
allegations that Tinubu had perjured and forged the credentials that qualified
him to run for the governorship election.
The allegations were contained in a petition dated August 12,
1999, written by Alhaji Jameed Seriki and Dr. Waliu Balogun-Smith. They alleged
a discrepancy in Tinubu’s age since the profile published during his
inauguration stated that he was born in 1952 and the age on his transcript at
the Chicago State University claimed that he was born in 1954.