Human rights lawyer, Professor Chidi Odinkalu, has questioned the lack of publicly established records on President Bola Tinubu’s early education, saying Nigerians deserve greater clarity on the President’s educational history.
Odinkalu spoke during an interview with Nigeria Info FM in remarks currently circulating on social media.
The former Chairman of the Governing Council of the National Human Rights Commission raised questions about Tinubu’s nationality, parentage and educational background, particularly the records relating to his primary and secondary education.
“We have a President whose nationality we do not know because he carries a Guinean diplomatic passport, whose parentage, whose genealogy we do not know and we now understand that President Buhari thought the same thing too, whose primary school we do not know, whose secondary school we do not know,” Odinkalu said.
He questioned whether the President may have been educated at home before proceeding to university, referring to a position he attributed Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Festus Keyamo.
“But what if he was taught at home? And who now claims to have gone to university? If he was homeschooled as Festus Kayamo posited, famously, the Senior Advocate of Nigeria, then they should say so,” he said.
Odinkalu argued that homeschooling, if that was the case, would still ordinarily be followed by some form of educational certification before a person proceeded to higher education.
“Homeschool is a preparatory process. After that you go forward for certification, right?” he asked.
He also referred to previous educational claims attributed to Tinubu, saying some of the institutions reportedly listed by the President in earlier forms had subsequently been disputed.
“But the thing is that he had claimed Government College Ibadan, by the way, in previous forms and he had claimed other things that proved false,” Odinkalu said.
The lawyer questioned how the educational record could be established if there were no corresponding primary and secondary school certifications.
“Now they are trying to make up records or to clean up records in order to align with a current eligibility threshold. How do you not go through primary and secondary certification but you have a university degree?” he asked.
Odinkalu maintained that attending a school, regardless of its location or status, should not be considered insignificant, particularly if that institution produced a future president.
“Is it not an achievement for a school to have produced a president? No matter how remote the school could have been,” he said.
He illustrated the point with his own educational experience, recalling that he began primary school as an internally displaced person following the Nigerian Civil War.
“I started off primary school as an internally displaced person after the Nigerian Civil War. And I know the primary school I started off in, if I mention it to you, it’s not in any place on the map. But I take pride in it and I take pride in the fact that I passed through that primary school,” Odinkalu said.
The comments have resurfaced on social media amid renewed public debate over Tinubu’s background and the documentation surrounding his early life. Odinkalu’s assertions remain his own claims and are presented as such in the interview.
(The Sun)