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The birther movement that challenged the eligibility of Barack Obama to be president marked a slump in political decency in the U.S. More than a decade later, this strategy is finding new life in Nigeria.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, elected in February, is simultaneously facing accusations of stealing the identity of a female student at Chicago State University (CSU) and forging university diplomas previously submitted to the electoral commission. In theory, both could disqualify him from his position. The BBC’s disinformation team has confirmed there is no evidence for either claim.
Since February’s election, the opposition in Africa’s largest democracy has been attempting to overturn the result. This is not unusual; almost every losing party in Nigeria has since the return to multiparty politics from military rule in 1999. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing. When parties have grievances over the outcome, it is surely better they contest the result in court than in the streets or worse.
In October, the Nigerian Supreme Court ruled against the legal challenge filed by two opposition parties. If the judgment stands, the airing and adjudicating of evidence can help reinforce the democratic system.
Spreading disinformation over a president’s legitimacy does the opposite. In West Africa, this is dangerous. Men in fatigues have been relieving civilian rulers of their duties. In the summer, Niger became the latest in the region to suffer a military coup, joining Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso.
Siphoning legitimacy from democratic leaders can only help clear the path for such seizures. If citizens believe their civilian president has illegitimately snatched power, then the replacement need not come through constitutional means. Were this to happen in Nigeria, with an economy larger than the rest of the region combined, the ramifications would be devastating.
Leading the Nigerian forgery claims is six-time presidential hopeful Atiku Abubakar, 76. As if full circle, the quest purportedly for the truth has taken his team back to the U.S., where Abubakar was banned from entering for more than a decade on corruption charges.
The document at the heart of the dispute is Tinubu’s CSU diploma submitted to the electoral commission. A discrepancy emerged: The president of the university who signed the certificate arrived almost two decades after Tinubu was supposed to have graduated. The explanation for this was the diploma had been reissued and re-signed in the 1990s, after Tinubu had lost the original during his flight into political exile from military rule. Abubakar’s lawyers have been subjecting CSU to lawsuits to force the divulgence of information about Tinubu’s academic record. Despite CSU confirming in a U.S. federal court that Tinubu graduated in 1979, Abubakar’s lawyers secured a further court order for the university to release documents. These again reaffirmed CSU’s position.
Yet social media platforms are awash with forgery claims, using the same documents out of context or selectively to prove the plot — no matter that they had been classified as disinformation by the BBC. As Jonathan Swift once wrote: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after.”
Peter Obi, who with Tinubu and Abubakar was the other main contender in this year’s election, has also now weighed in: “He should let the world know his name, nationality his place of birth, his parentage, the primary and secondary schools he attended with dates as well as the actual universities he attended and certificates obtained.” With that, Nigeria birtherism reaches its apogee.
And to take just the last from his list of requests, it begs the question what more evidence can be supplied. CSU has repeatedly confirmed Tinubu’s graduation and has now released corroborating documents. This paints a worrying prospect of how to fight falsehoods in public discourse: Is the power of evidence enough to dislodge disinformation when the latter has dedicated megaphones?
Even more worrying is the confluence of disinformation with a rise in support for military rule on the continent. Across 36 countries, 53% of Africans would endorse military government if elected officials abused their power, according to data from Afrobarometer, a pan-African, nonpartisan research network. The share of Africans who prefer democracy over any other form of government has declined 10 percentage points over the past decade. These trends will only continue as disinformation proliferates.
Mat Whatley is a former security chief for the European Union Election Observation Mission in Abuja.
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