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Oliver Chukwu
It is a surprise that there is still a fog over the secondary school certificate examination (SSCE) of President Muhammadu Buhari. Even after the verdict of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal on the 11th of August, which seems to have left too many facts hanging, it appeared the President’s certificate riddle has defied judicial resolution.
The idea of a sworn affidavit taking the place of an SSCE certificate has excited spirited debate in our streets and other places. And the combatants and disputants are the regular men and women, almost equally divided, between those who believe in certificates and those who think that certificates actually are not worth all the fetish being made of them by education authorities and the education mandarins who have refused to see that what actually counts is what you know, not the number of certificates in the bottom of your suit case.
And they can easily point to the certificate rackets that seem to exist everywhere in the world, charging a small fee for any kind of certificate their patrons might need. The rackets set prices for a bachelor’s, a master’s, and for Ph.Ds. and other diplomas and certificates. Indeed, even earlier in the year we also discovered that the certificate of the National Youth Service Corps, which actually does not transmit any skills or learning, could also be forged and bought by Nigerians who do not want to go through the drudgery of a one year of national service.
Then the other side counters: if you remove certificates, you might as well remove examinations since examinations are always the source of certificates. If you end examinations, how are we going to be able to measure how students are doing in their studies? When they have completed their course of studies, how are we going to decide that they have measured up to the standards set for their level of education or level of skills in the case of vocational courses. These disputes are as old as the beginning of formal education and there is no possible resolution.
And in the particular case of MuhammaduBuhari, his certificate imbroglio is fascinating indeed. For a man who attempted to win the presidency four times before this year’s second and re-election victory, the question is what certificate did he tender when he filed for candidacy in 2003? What was the position of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in 2003? In 2007, he also ran for president and lost not for his lacking a certificate. In 2011 when his loss unleashed a storm, the problem then had nothing to do with his not presenting a certificate. Could it be that INEC did not bother to check? And if so, was it not a dereliction of duty?
But Buhari did not help matters when in 2015 he claimed that his certificates were with the military board and could be examined on request. Everyone continued to believe this claim until one of his witnesses, Major-General Paul Tafa (rtd), told the tribunal that he joined the Army on April 16, 1962, on the same day as President Buhari. He denied that the military board had ordered them to submit their certificates. There was however no explanation for Buhari’s claim that his certificates were with the board. One or two things could have happened. The President probably forgot but if he did not, then Gen. Tafa was probably the one who forgot. And if it was none of these, then could it be a case of a misleading statement which would be strange indeed.
The issue had been a subject of litigation as to the statutory qualification of the general to run as the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate for president in the face of the constitutional provision and the power of INEC to exclude aspirants who have shown no proof of meeting the specified qualifications.
This was the basis on which the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) accused the APC candidate of failing to meet the educational qualifications criteria of Section 131 of the 1999 Constitution which stipulates that a candidate must possess a secondary school certificate or its equivalent. The failure of President Buhari to deposit a copy of his school certificate with INEC disqualifies him in the eyes of his political opponents and, probably, the law.
Yet there is some confusion about the exact intention of the law owing to what looks like a conflict between the Constitution and the Electoral Act. The Constitution provides for the exclusion of unqualified candidates, but Section 31 (1) of the Electoral Act 2010 (as Amended) prevents INEC from excluding or disqualifying any candidate proposed by a political party for an election for any reason whatsoever. The Constitution seems to balance the situation by vesting the Courts with the power of disqualification of candidates who failed the constitutional qualification test.
The Buhari certificate saga has created a mine of controversy and recently an Abuja lawyer filed a suit in a Federal High Court in Abuja to disqualify Buhari on the grounds of perjury based on the inaccurate information contained in the affidavit he submitted to INEC. He was apparently testing the law, especially, to reconcile an anomaly between the Constitution and Section 31(5) of the Electoral Act. It allows a person who has a reasonable ground to believe that false information was given by a candidate could file a suit praying the court to declare the information in the affidavit to be false.
A similar suit filed by three lawyers last month seeking the disqualification of President Buhari also on grounds of perjury was struck out because the case was statute barred. Now that Atiku Abubakar and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have taken the matter to Supreme Court, Nigerians are looking up to the Supreme Court justices to finally resolve the issue once and for all. All the parties to the case must abide by the apex court’s ruling whichever way it goes.
Chukwu writes from Enugu
