BY: BODE OPESEITAN
Every con needs a witness. Dr Adetokunbo Pearse made a sensational claim against Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, then offered himself as the proof. On News Central TV, he announced that he had directed “the program in which Tinubu said he attended” at Chicago State University (CSU), and that he therefore knows the president never studied there. It is a thrilling claim. It is also a claim whose first sentence contains its own refutation.
Pearse says he served at CSU from 1985 to 1990. CSU has said, including under oath in a United States court in 2023, that Bola Tinubu graduated on June 22, 1979.
By Pearse’s own dates, the witness arrived six years after the defendant left. A man cannot testify to the absence of a student from a campus he had not yet entered.
The mismatch runs deeper than the calendar. Tinubu studied accounting in the College of Business Administration, a conventional degree track. Pearse, a linguist and a teacher of literature, ran University Without Walls, a program built for adult learners and assembled around individual portfolios. The two operated in different corners of the same institution. Pearse is vouching for a building he never worked in.
Here the case turns from error to something stranger. A program like University Without Walls lives on intimacy. Its directors read every student’s life history and take pride in knowing the people they admit. I would suggest, as opinion, that a man who spent five years in that culture could come to treat a sprawling commuter university as a village in which no figure of note passes unseen by him. Hubris of that kind is a recognisable academic disease. It is not evidence about anyone else’s transcript.
The interview also shows how thin his proof is. He says that around 1999 Tinubu’s critics sent people to collect records from him, and that he handed them over. Records of a student who left in 1979, held by a man who arrived in 1985? He does not say how he came to hold them or why they were never produced. He says only that he “had the information” and that he told the critics to campaign on performance. A witness with real documents would have shown them. This one offers his own certainty in their place.
Dr. Reuben Abati, during an inquest on Arise TV, asked the obvious question: does teaching at a university for five years entitle a man to its records? He pointed out that he has graded the papers of many students and holds none of their files. The answer is no. The registrar keeps the records, and CSU’s registrar has already spoken, under oath. When the institution that owns the file contradicts the man who claims to know its contents, the institution wins.
The official position is also an open invitation. As Ojy Okpe noted, CSU remains accessible, and anyone who doubts can ask. That rules out the usual defense of a mistaken accuser, that the truth was hidden from him. Here the truth was one inquiry away, and Pearse preferred the more dramatic course.
Then there is the cell. Pearse reportedly consigned the president to jail, at the International Criminal Court no less. As Dr. Abati noted, that court was built for genocide and aggression, not for disputed diplomas. A scholar who misplaces the ICC’s jurisdiction as casually as he misplaces his own tenure is not a careful witness.
The irony deserves a plain statement. Pearse has called a sitting president a “professional crook” and a “bonafide liar” and has said that he has no integrity. He has based those words on a timeline the university’s sworn record destroys. Should the president’s camp decide to sue, or to invoke Nigeria’s criminal-defamation or cyber-offence provisions, Pearse would face the question the law asks of every accuser: what did you know, and when did you know it? His own dates answer it badly. This is my opinion, not legal advice, and whether to prosecute is a decision for the president’s lawyers.
The man who wanted Tinubu to rot in a cell may have drafted his own indictment. He claimed an authority his dates deny him and certainty he could not have earned. He then told the whole country, on camera, that the other man “knows that I know.”
On this record, the only thing Pearse can be shown to know is the date he arrived.