The Charleston Gazette was an American newspaper that was born in 1907 but stopped bearing that name in 2015.
One of the newspaper’s 1952 editions contained a piece with a clause that may have been written for Tinubu’s Nigeria: “Chicago, that’s an old Indian word meaning ‘get that elephant out of your room’.” Someone said coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. I would say that this ‘Chicago’ sentence perfectly fits into Nigeria’s current basket of trouble.
There is no way you’ll be a user of the English language and you won’t have come across ‘an elephant in the room.’
The first time you heard or read it, you probably wondered how the elephant got into the room in the first place.
My English teachers and my dictionary told me that ‘an elephant in the room’ points at a major problem or a solution or a matter, knotty and controversial; manifest and obvious to everyone but is deliberately ignored or avoided for discussion by everyone because it is a taboo or a potential source of trouble or sorrow or embarrassment.
The biggest questions among President Bola Tinubu’s family and friends should be: Why again? And who was the enemy within who procured the contentious “replacement certificate” for him? Those questions are very big, like an elephant, the biggest land animal the world has yet seen. Yet, it is possible for it to be present and remain unseen, particularly if the world is scared of the consequences of seeing it. It is ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ around the president.
That is the definition of loyalty in imperial palaces. No one around Abuja is asking the right questions; no one in Abuja is offering the right answers because nobody wants to be quoted as saying the wrong things and losing influence in the royal court. No one is telling the president the truth that this Chicago certificate problem is a real problem. They are clapping for the naked king and abusing the critical bard. Why would a supposedly wise man fall twice at the same spot? The first time was when he contested and won the governorship of Lagos State, and now this – right in the centre of the world market.
Tinubu spoke with so much confidence at Chatham House on December 5, 2022. He mocked his critics as he announced that he had collected a replacement copy of his degree certificate from the Chicago State University. An applause followed that announcement. But that university last Monday said on oath that Tinubu did not collect his degree certificate from the institution. So, where and how did our president get what he announced in London? After his technical escape from Gani Fawehinmi in 1999/2000, he was not expected to play games with certificates again. He said he had got the replacement certificate from the issuing authority, the school. But there is nothing on record showing that he travelled to the United States to personally collect the certificate from the university. The big man probably sent someone, and who could that be? And if the person faked the stuff without his knowledge, why did he do that to our president? Now, the whole world knows that what the president holds is not from the university; it is a counterfeit made by characters who would easily con Ali in ‘Ali and the Angel.’
Everyone around the president is saying the same thing: how a certificate is procured does not matter. They endorse what they themselves won’t accept from anyone. No one among the president’s men is seeing the big elephant in the Villa. Writer, poet and Russia’s most celebrated fabulist, Ivan Andreyevich Krylov, in 1814 wrote ‘The Inquisitive Man’ The main character in that story visited a museum, moved around, noticed and touched the smallest of things there. Interestingly, there was an elephant in its awesome bigness there; the inquisitive man didn’t see it.