In season three of The Wire, when Avon Barksdale hesitates over a gangland war sparked by flawed premises, his pragmatically ruthless lieutenant, Slim Charles, cuts through the existential noise with cold street poetry: “If it’s a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight.”
Few expected that Baltimore corner-boy realism would find its purest executive expression in the grand corridors of Aso Rock. Yet, watching President Bola Ahmed Tinubu navigate his biographical Bermuda Triangle, one realizes Slim Charles wasn’t just talking about turf wars, he was writing modern political doctrine.
For decades, the standard path to public office required an uncomplicated paper trail. For Tinubu, the trail has always resembled an avant-garde mystery novel. Decades ago, official submissions claimed attendance at secondary institutions before those schools were founded, paired with early childhood alma maters where, curiously, not a single living classmate seems to recall sharing a bench, a snack, or a morning assembly. It was a ghost ledger of education, an elaborate backstory built on quicksand.
When the discrepancies inevitably caught up with reality, the strategy wasn’t apology or clarification, it was the classic tactical pivot. By the time fresh electoral filings arrived at INEC, the phantom primary and secondary years were simply vaporized from the paperwork. Instead, the legal threshold was satisfied from the top down with the certified university degree, leaving investigators grasping at thin air. To every lingering inquiry about where the journey actually began, the official posture has hardened into an impenetrable wall of silence.
It is an audacious gambit of pure survival. In Nigerian politics, admitting fault is an unconditional surrender, but doubling down is statecraft. You do not explain away the vanishing school years; you build a fortress on the remaining credentials, deploy your legal heavyweights, and dare the opposition to breach the perimeter.
Politics at this level has never been an earnest search for archival truth, it is a war of position. The narrative might be built on shifting ground, but retreat is not on the ballot. True to the Slim Charles doctrine, the lie is the trench, survival is the only objective, and the fight goes on.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 