Hall of counterfeit credentials: A nation’s integrity on the auction block
By Tony Edemenaha
In every republic, the doorway to leadership should be a turnstile, not a revolving door—one that sifts the wheat from the chaff with the quiet authority of due diligence.
Yet in our national space, the turnstile often groans, lets through counterfeit tokens, and shouts “Next!” to credentials that look good on a stage prop but crumble under the light of scrutiny.
The result is less a cabinet and more a hall of mirrors where leaders gaze confidently at themselves. At the same time, the audience sees their reflections refract into fraud, self-dealing, and impunity.
Anecdotes travel faster than policy, and they travel with the bite of a bite-sized truth. I recently heard of a university professor who kept a shelf of honorary degrees—earned, as the joke goes, by newsletters and late-night email signatures.
The degree he brandished at press conferences wasn’t a diploma so much as a costume piece, a theatrical prop that allowed him to strut with the gravity of a scholar. At the same time, his actual footprint on scholarship remained as faint as a distant star.
The satire of a nation’s elite often sits uncomfortably close to the truth: credential inflation that makes the value of real achievement look like a bargain bin bargain. The moral imagination of a country is measured not by its slogans but by the people it places at the helm of critical institutions.
Our national space—the economy, security, science, governance—deserves leaders who can cite a source, verify a claim, and take responsibility when a misstep becomes a crater. Instead, we witness a routine where the real work gets outsourced to lawyers and spin doctors who can argue a case but not adjudicate it.
The protean performance of certifying bodies—universities, accreditation agencies, and civil service controls—appears as a theatre troupe that has forgotten to retire its masks. The chaff is not simply weeded out; it’s paraded as if it were the wheat that feeds the nation.
A metaphor comes to mind: we are navigating a grand library where the bibliographies have been rewritten by the very people who are supposed to guard them. Each page is a velvet-clad lie, each bookmark a breadcrumb trail to a forged credential.
Yet the guardians who should sniff out these contrivances often look the other way, perhaps dazzled by the spectacle of authority or possibly overwhelmed by the complexity of modern credentialing.
The system, in that sense, has become an extended, bureaucratic criminal enterprise, a tower of Babel where the builders forget to install a common language of integrity.
We should be stunned and sickened by the recurring moral question marks hovering over specific well-known figures, including the late President Muhammadu Buhari and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, whose academic trajectories have invited questions as persistent as the harm caused by fraud itself. When public trust is the most precious currency of leadership, to trade it for the currency of a prestigious-sounding but unvetted credential is to debase the common good.
The public deserves transparency; leaders deserve accountability; and political actors deserve to be evaluated not by the prestige of their pedigrees, but by verifiable evidence of their competencies and commitment to the public welfare.
The recent case of Godwin Uche Nnaji, the Minister of Science and Technology, arrives like a punch line that refuses to end. Allegations of forged degrees and NYSC discharge certificates are not merely administrative missteps; they are a fundamental breach of the social covenant.
The audacity of legal acrobatics in defence of forged documentation is more nauseating than a rancid meal—because it feeds a culture of impunity that commands the energies of the good and punishes the innocent.
When a Minister stands before the public to defend falsified credentials, the nation’s faith in governance dissolves into a fog of cynicism. It’s not just about one man or one case; it’s about what such acts do to the social fabric—how they corrode the belief that merit matters, that hard work and honesty pay, and that leadership is a service rather than a status.
To lampoon this state of affairs would be easy; to challenge it requires a more stubborn resolve. We must insist on the concrete, not the convenient. That is, make credential verification a standardised, automated, and transparent process, with cross-agency interoperability, so that no one can safely parade a forged credential across multiple platforms.
We should also acknowledge a more far-reaching truth: credential theatrics thrive in environments where the bar is perpetually moved. If a degree is merely a signifier of a possible competency rather than a guarantor of it, we must recalibrate.
The value of leadership lies not in the pedigree of the person, but in the proven ability to deliver tangible results, demonstrate accountability, and uphold the moral responsibilities that accompany power. It is not enough to “look competent”; we must ensure that the world can verify competence in real time.
In this moment, the nation faces a choice: to continue treating a parade of credentials as proof of character, or to re-anchor leadership in a shared standard of truth-telling and performance. The former secures a temporary elite and a long, corrosive cynicism; the latter ensures a future where governance is a trust, not a theatre.
The test is not whether we can tolerate a few boldface names with questionable pasts; the test is whether we are willing to build a system in which those names would have been ruled out before they ever stepped onto the stage.
The moral calculus is simple, even if the politics is thorny. We deserve leaders whose spaces are free of taint, and whose histories can bear scrutiny without flinching. If an academic credential is the passport to power, let that passport be gold-plated with verification, not forged with counterfeit signatures and deception.
If a minister’s record is a map, let it be a transparent one, with clear routes from concept to impact, not a labyrinth of evasive deferrals.
A nation’s character is not a line on a resume; it is the sum of how we respond when trust is breached. The moment a public figure tries to shrug off allegations of forgery as mere “antics,” the country loses a little more of its moral compass.
We cannot afford to be dazzled by the flash of a credential without demanding the substance that should accompany it: a track record of integrity, diligence, and service. And so, we must insist on a renewed covenant between the state and the citizen: that leadership will be earned again, earned through verifiable truth and demonstrated competence, not bought through a certificate of convenience.
The door to the future must open inward toward accountability, not outward toward vanity. If we cannot repair the hinges today, the door will keep swinging—reopening to the same faces, the same excuses, the same rituals of denial—while the nation waits, increasingly legless in its own theatre of power.
To the observers, critics, and ordinary people who feel the weight of this problem, know this: the fight for credible leadership is fought not in the heated rhetoric of partisan battles but in the quiet, persistent work of verification, reform, and courage.
The mathematics are unforgiving: the more we tolerate forged credentials, the more leaders we import with forged consciences. The antidote is equally straightforward and stubborn: insist on proof, demand accountability, punish deception, and protect the vulnerable who bear the consequences of a few’s mistakes.
In the end, a nation is not built by the brilliance of a few speakers in glass offices; the integrity of its everyday actions sustains it—the teachers who show up, the civil servants who follow the rulebook, the journalists who expose the truth, and the citizens who demand better.
Let the discourse move beyond witty one-liners and moral plate-glass façades. Let it move toward bright, verifiable reality: a leadership culture that is as rigorous in scrutiny as it is generous in service.
Because if we do not fix this now, the next generation will inherit a country where the hall of power is a gallery of counterfeit medals—beautiful to glance at, dangerous to trust. And that is a national tragedy no caption can fix.
*Tony Edemenaha, poet and social commentator, writes from Asaba
