UNN, Geoffrey Nnaji and a question of honour

It is a huge relief that Geoffrey Uchechukwu Nnaji has resigned as minister of innovation, science & technology in disgrace after years of being embroiled in allegations of forgery and perjury. I understand that President Tinubu asked for his resignation on Tuesday afternoon, soon after he returned from Lagos.

He was worried that the scandal was overwhelming his administration and distracting him from focusing on the critical issues confronting the nation. For acting promptly and decisively, I commend the president. I graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in the same year the minister claimed to have graduated from this very important citadel of learning, and so I was very interested in this matter. I actually compared the signatures on my certificate with the ones on the fake one Nnaji has been parading. The difference couldn’t be starker.

I was therefore pleased when the vice chancellor and registrar of UNN eventually confirmed to Premium Times that Nnaji’s certificate was not genuine. The newspaper did a marvellous job investigating this scandal in the last three years, the same way it unearthed that Kemi Adeosun, former President Buhari’s first finance minister, had presented a forged NYSC exemption certificate to the government. The revelation led to the resignation of the minister on September 14, 2018, about 69 days after the paper first reported the scandal in July.

But how was it possible for Nnaji to deceive the senate, DSS, and indeed the whole nation for that long? It must be a systemic problem – a culture that encourages fraud and protects fraudulent persons. Nnaji tried to use the court to deceive the nation by filing all sorts of processes and obtaining injunctions to stop UNN from affirming his true status. Corrupt politicians always run to the courts for cover-ups. The judge who issued that injunction should face disciplinary action from NJC.

I commend the VC and registrar of UNN for living up to the motto of the university: To Restore the Dignity of Man. By standing by the truth, the management of UNN has honoured the memory of Nnamdi Azikiwe and other founding fathers of this great institution and made us, the millions of its alumni, proud. I couldn’t be prouder of being a lion. It is a matter of honour for a university to protect its name from shame and insulate its reputation from disgrace from corrupt politicians and unconscionable people. Nnaji had tried all sorts of tactics to cover up his tracks, sometimes working to manipulate the university officials to play along with him. But it’s all over now.

What happens to Nnaji now? Would he be prosecuted, as many Nigerians are clamouring for, or would he slide back into obscurity and wait for a while before bouncing back into politics? He was the governorship candidate of APC in Enugu state in the 2023 election and came a distant third with a paltry 14,575 votes, trailing Labour Party’s Chijioke Edeoga (157,552 votes) and PDP’s Peter Mbah (160,895 votes).

Reports say that Nnaji was already preparing to run again in 2027, and his major preoccupation in the last few months has been to make every effort to block the incumbent governor from defecting to the APC. When President Tinubu visited Enugu a few months ago and praised Mbah for his impressive performance, Nnaji was said to have fumed endlessly, saying that the president had unwittingly strengthened an opponent.

A friend from Enugu who was involved in the 2023 elections recently told me that although many people in the state were aware of Nnaji’s questionable credentials during the campaigns, nobody made a case of it because it was widely known that he stood a slim chance of winning. Now, he will likely suspend his political ambitions for some time, at least, before plotting his next move.

There are still many other officials in government, including the national assembly, with forged credentials. When Kemi Adeosun resigned as finance minister in September 2018 for allegedly forging an NYSC exemption certificate, we had expected that the DSS, which is responsible for vetting the backgrounds of potential appointees, would do a better job subsequently. But we were wrong, and the nation was the loser. When a person of doubtful character leads a country or a government department, deception becomes the main diet of governance. Nnaji has become the second minister in the last two years to leave office in shame. DSS should do a better job of saving us from these embarrassments.