The Myth of Vanishing Credentials: Why Omission is Electoral Perjury – By Haruna Yahaya

The Myth of Vanishing Credentials: Why Omission is Electoral Perjury – By Haruna Yahaya

When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu presented himself to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) ahead of the 2023 general elections, he did not do so with casual oral assertions. He did so under the unyielding weight of sanctity and sanction: via sworn affidavits and statutory documents submitted on oath.

Those documents, detailing his primary, secondary, and tertiary educational pedigree, formed the foundational bedrock upon which his candidacy was legitimized. They became part of the public archives, welded to the immutable historical integrity of the Nigerian state.

To suddenly watch those exact documents evaporate from subsequent disclosures, or to treat them as optional accessories that can be omitted, doctored, or substituted at whim, is not a mere administrative oversight. It is a direct assault on the very rule of law and an act of legal delinquency that threatens to turn Nigerian electoral jurisprudence into a farce.

In the architecture of Nigerian electoral law, an affidavit deposited with INEC is not a loose napkin or flimsy draft; it is a solemn instrument executed before a commissioner of oaths, a notary public, or a court of competent jurisdiction.

Under Section 29(1) of the Electoral Act 2022, a political party must submit its candidates’ nomination forms accompanied by affidavits sworn by the candidates themselves.
The purpose of this statutory requirement is transparent and self-evident: to bind the candidate by their own words under the threat of criminal prosecution for perjury.

Once an affidavit is submitted to INEC, it ceases to be the private property of the candidate. It enters the public domain as an immutable testament. By operation of law and established jurisprudence, records presented on oath to an electoral body cannot be arbitrarily withdrawn, unilaterally altered, or stealthily substituted outside the strict, narrow windows permitted by statute.

To allow a candidate to present one set of credentials to attain power in 2023, only for him to disown, omit, or alter those foundational records later, is to mock the integrity of the judicial and electoral process. It introduces a dangerous doctrine of “selective memory” into our public life, where historical facts are marshaled only when convenient and flushed down the toilet hole of memory when they become politically inconvenient.

Whatever the law forbids directly, it also forbids indirectly. If the extant laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria heavily restrict the substitution or alteration of candidate documents after submission, an omission of previously sworn credentials is nothing short of an intellectual and legal fraud.

1. The Ghost of Perjury (Section 115 of the Electoral Act 2022): The law is clear. Under Section 115(1)(c) and (d) of the Electoral Act 2022, any person who signs a statement or affidavit required by the Act which they know to be false or contains a material omission commits an offence. If the documents submitted in 2023 were true, omitting them now to craft a new narrative implies either that the original submissions were fraudulent or that the current omissions are calculated falsehoods. Both positions entrap the perpetrator in an inescapable web of criminal liability. Truth does not change depending on the election cycle.

2. The Doctrine of Estoppel and Record Finality: In law, the principle of estoppel prevents a party from taking positions in court or before administrative bodies that contradict their previous solemn declarations. Chief Bola Tinubu cannot approbate and reprobate. He cannot utilize a specific set of educational credentials to validate his emergence as President in 2023, and then treat those very credentials as disposable items in subsequent administrative filings. The public record is a continuum; it is not a whiteboard that can be wiped clean whenever a new political season begins.

It must also be emphasized, that the Independent National Electoral Commission is not a private secretariat for politicians. It is an independent constitutional body entrusted with the custody of the nation’s democratic soul. When an institution established by Section 153 of the 1999 Constitution watches in mute complicity as documents submitted on oath are treated with casual disdain, or ignored, or omitted, or swapped, it abdicates its primary statutory duty.

INEC is bound by law to safeguard the integrity of documents submitted to it. To condone the sudden and dubious disappearance of primary, secondary, or university credentials previously sworn to, is to convert INEC into an accomplice to an ongoing constitutional subversion.

If records submitted under oath can be edited out of existence by mere omission, then the entire architecture of candidate screening collapses. What stops any politician from submitting forged documents to win an election, and then quietly omitting them from subsequent records to evade accountability?

This issue transcends the person of Bola Ahmed Tinubu; it is a fundamental stress test for the Nigerian state. I am asking a blunt, unyielding question: Is Nigeria a nation governed by immutable laws, or is it a fiefdom ruled by the shifting convenience of one powerful infividual?

An oath is a covenant with the people of Nigeria. When that covenant is tampered with through strategic amnesia or criminal omission, the state itself is undermined. INEC must wake up from its institutional slumber, reject this blatant rewriting of history, and enforce the full weight of the Electoral Act.

For if records sworn on oath before ascension to office can vanish into thin air, then the very oath of that office itself becomes entirely meaningless.

✍️ Haruna Yahaya
Poloma
3/8/26

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