Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
When Atiku Abubakar told the BBC that he holds evidence on the President’s true age and will lay it before a court, the palace criers rushed out to call it a smear. It is not a smear. It is the oldest unanswered question in Nigerian public life, and Atiku is merely the latest and most senior Nigerian to put it where it belongs, which is before a judge rather than on a timeline.
The question did not begin with him. It began with a Yoruba man of unimpeachable credentials who had no northern axe to grind at all.
ODUMAKIN, WHO KNEW HIM
The late Yinka Odumakin was National Publicity Secretary of Afenifere, a NADECO veteran of the struggle against military rule, and one of the most fearless polemicists Yoruba politics produced in a generation. He died in April 2021. He was not a northerner, not a PDP man, and not an outsider to Lagos politics. He knew the subject at close quarters.
In 2018 he published in Vanguard a serial titled “Portrait of the Tiger Ambode Rode”, an eyewitness account of Lagos politics from 1998 onward by a man who had been in the room. On 19 March 2019 he addressed a further instalment to the subject directly, opening “Dear Chief Tinubu”, written in answer to a piece published on the back page of The Nation of Tuesday 12 March. It is that open letter, republished across the Nigerian press ever since, that put the age question in plain figures.
The letter is not a rumour of the internet. When Odumakin died in April 2021, Daily Trust carried an obituary that referred to the 2019 letter and quoted from it, recording that after the two men fell out he never again spared the man he had once helped.
The argument in the letter was not rhetorical. It was arithmetical, and it rested on people and objects that can be checked.
He put the true figure at about 80, not the 66 then being advanced, and he gave his reasons.
He began with a nephew. The then governor of Osun is described in the letter as the son of Tinubu’s immediate senior sister from Iragbiji, and was 63 at the time of writing. Set that beside a claimed 66 and the arithmetic collapses. An elder sister does not produce a son 3 years younger than her own junior brother.
He turned next to the first wife, who he wrote had died in Lagos at 74, and had gone unannounced. Two charges sit inside that sentence. A wife of 74 sits awkwardly beside a husband claiming 66. And the word unannounced is the sharper of the two, for a man who buries public figures with full ceremony and pageantry.
He added that a son she had borne had died some months earlier, and alleged that the son’s recorded age had to be adjusted so that it would fit the father’s stated one.
He raised the schools. He listed his own, from primary school in Ondo through Ile-Ife to Obafemi Awolowo University, and said his classmates would come forward in droves to confirm every one of them. Against that he set the old boys of Government College Ibadan, who had planned a reception for Tinubu until somebody asked which set he belonged to. No answer came. The reception was cancelled. It has never been held.
And he pointed to a photograph. The palace of the Soun of Ogbomoso, 1974, the installation of the reigning monarch, and a young man seated with a bottle of beer and a packet of cigarettes before him.
You mean you were 20 when you were drinking and smoking in a palace?
THE MAN WHO STOOD IN HIS PLACE
The letter named someone else, and this is its gravest passage.
Odumakin wrote that Senator Tokunbo Afikuyomi was among the party that travelled to Iragbiji to bury Tinubu’s biological mother, at a burial the son himself did not attend. He calls Afikuyomi the fall guy for the forgeries of 1999, recalls Tinubu dismissing him in Yoruba in 2006 as a fowl that turns back for corn, and asks whether the man’s later departure did not show there are people who value principle above money.
The contrast Odumakin then draws is the cruellest line in the whole letter. He notes that his own parents were then alive in Osun, and says simply that he will give them a befitting burial.
The charge is not merely about a date of birth. It is that other men were made to carry this man’s family obligations for him, and were disparaged for their trouble.
One distinction must be held firmly here, because it is where the defenders will strike. Alhaja Abibatu Mogaji, who died in 2013 at 96 and was buried at Vaults and Gardens, Ikoyi, with Lagos at a standstill, is not the woman Odumakin is writing about. His allegation concerns a biological mother at Iragbiji. Those are 2 different claims about 2 different women, and photographs of the 2013 funeral answer nothing at all about the first.
All of this remains Odumakin’s allegation. None of it has been tested to conclusion. He died in April 2021 and can no longer be cross-examined, which is precisely why the documents matter more than the testimony.
I have led a straight life, unlike you that people know under different identities depending on where they met you.
That was a Yoruba nationalist speaking to a Yoruba leader, in Yoruba public space, years before any northern candidate raised the matter. Those who now cry ethnic conspiracy must first explain Odumakin.
And they cannot explain him away as a stranger. The 2 men were allies in NADECO. Odumakin worked for his emergence in Alliance for Democracy politics before the break came, which he dates to December 2006. This is not the testimony of an opponent who never knew the man. It is the testimony of a former comrade who knew him from the inside and said so with his name attached, at a time when saying it in Lagos carried a price.
FOUR AGES, ONE MAN
Set the documents side by side and the difficulty is not that critics disagree with the President. It is that the President’s own paper trail disagrees with itself.
To the Independent National Electoral Commission, on sworn Form EC-9 filed on 17 June 2022, the year of birth given is 1952. The official biography puts the date at 29 March 1952.
In the records obtained from Chicago State University by subpoena in 2022, the year of birth carried for the Bola Tinubu who attended that institution is 1954.
In the reckoning Odumakin was disputing, the figure being advanced at the time was 66, and his own estimate was about 80.
And in March 2021, before Atiku said a word on the subject, Wikipedia editors were compelled to lock the President’s page after it was edited 84 times, with the age moving between 69 and 79, an episode the platform itself classified as persistent vandalism.
Now add Atiku’s statement to the BBC this week, that his own evidence puts the figure at 90.
Four figures. One man. One sworn form.
The point for the voter is not to adjudicate between them. That is what courts are for, and that is precisely where Atiku says he will take it. The point is that a President of the Federal Republic should not be a man about whom four different years of birth are in circulation, one of them on a document he swore to.
A PHOTOGRAPH IS NOT A BIRTH CERTIFICATE
Faced with all of that, what have the President’s defenders produced? Not a birth certificate. Not a naming ceremony record. Not the primary school register from St John Aroloya. Not the Government College Ibadan set list that the old boys themselves once asked for and never received.
They have produced a snapshot.
A photograph of the President walking a London street with Chief Dele Momodu in 1996 is now being circulated as though it settled a question of law. Look at him, they say. Does he look 60 there? Does Dele Momodu look like a man in his eighties today?
Study the poverty of that argument, because it is the whole of their case.
They cannot bring the register, so they bring the album.
First, it answers the wrong question. Nobody has alleged that Dele Momodu’s age is in doubt. His records have never been queried, never been subpoenaed, never been the subject of criminal complaints at Wuse Zone 6. His age is not the disputed quantity in this equation, and you cannot resolve a disputed document by placing an undisputed face beside it.
Second, and this is the elementary point they are counting on you not to make, a photograph of 2 men standing together tells you absolutely nothing about the distance in years between them. Nothing whatsoever. Go into any Nigerian family album this evening. Find the photographs of fathers standing with grown sons, of uncles beside nephews, of a man of 60 next to a man of 40, and try to tell them apart by the face alone. You cannot. This country has buried men who looked 45 at 70 and men who looked 60 at 45.
Complexion, weight, hairline, stress, sun, sickness, wealth, rest and the plain lottery of genes decide how a face wears its years. Not the calendar. A well-fed, well-rested man of means at 60 will out-photograph a labouring man of 40 every single time. This is not a controversial proposition. It is common knowledge in every compound in Nigeria.
Third, and here the mischief becomes deliberate, they demand a photographic standard of proof that they themselves refuse the moment it is turned around. Odumakin produced a photograph too. Ogbomoso, 1974, the beer and the cigarettes. When that photograph is raised they dismiss it instantly as speculation and malice. Now they hold up a 1996 street picture and call it evidence.
You cannot accept the camera as a witness when it flatters your principal and dismiss it as a liar when it does not. Either photographs prove age or they do not. Choose one, and stay there.
Fourth, note what the manoeuvre is actually for. It is a diversion. The question on the table is not what a man looked like on a London pavement 30 years ago. The question is why 1952 appears on a sworn form filed with the Independent National Electoral Commission while 1954 appears on records subpoenaed from Chicago State University, and why a page had to be locked after 84 edits moved the number between 69 and 79.
Those are documents. Documents can be examined, compared, authenticated and tested on oath. A snapshot cannot be cross-examined. It has no custodian, no chain of authentication and no penalty for lying, because it says nothing at all.
They bring the Fuji records too, telling us that the late Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, born in February 1948, addressed the President as aburo.
Let it be conceded at once, because no Yoruba man will accept otherwise. Aburo means younger. It is a word about birth order and it is not loosely given. On that they are correct, and we will not insult the language by pretending otherwise.
But look at what their own evidence actually establishes, and then look at what they need it to establish.
Barrister was not present at the birth. Barrister had no register, no certificate and no independent means of knowing. Barrister knew precisely what every other Nigerian knew, which is the figure the man himself had published. Born in 1948, and told the man before him was born in 1952, of course he says aburo. What else would he say? He is not attesting to a fact. He is repeating a claim back to the man who supplied it.
That is the whole trick, and it must be named for what it is. They take the disputed figure, feed it into the world, wait for the world to address the man accordingly, and then present that echo as proof of the figure. It is a circle. The claim is being used to authenticate itself.
A forged document is not made genuine by the number of people who relied on it in good faith.
Apply their own logic and see it break. If the true year is 1936, then Barrister was the junior and was misled like everybody else. If the true year is 1952, then aburo is correct. But which of those is true is the entire question before us, and the greeting cannot answer it, because the greeting was issued on the strength of the answer.
This is the same fallacy as the London photograph, dressed in agbada. A face cannot testify. A praise name cannot testify. Neither has a custodian, an oath, or a penalty for being wrong.
Bring the register of births, not the sleeve notes.
So let it be said plainly what these men are. They are not researchers, they are courtiers. Mischievous, sycophantic, intellectually dishonest and wilfully obtuse. Hired defenders whose loyalty is to a payroll and not to a fact. Sophists who mistake noise for argument and volume for proof. Men who would insult the intelligence of 200 million Nigerians rather than walk into a registry and come back with 1 sheet of paper.
Because that is all it would take. One certified copy. One document. One afternoon’s work.
WHY IT IS NOT A TRIVIAL QUESTION
Some will say the man’s age is nobody’s business. It would not be, but for 3 things.
First, he swore to it. The Constitution and the Electoral Act make the presentation of false information to the Commission a matter going to qualification. The oath is the offence, not the birthday. In November 2022 the lawyer Mike Enahoro-Ebah filed 3 direct criminal complaints at the Chief Magistrate’s Court, Wuse Zone 6, Abuja, in cases marked CR/121/2022, CR/122/2022 and CR/123/2022, alleging forgery, falsification of age and lying on oath, and grounded them on records subpoenaed from Chicago State University. These remain allegations, tested nowhere to conclusion.
Second, this same establishment has spent a fortnight telling Nigerians that a candidate approaching 80 is too old to govern. A government that makes age a disqualification has surrendered any right to treat its own principal’s age as a private matter. You cannot campaign on arithmetic and then refuse to show your working.
Third, and most seriously, a man’s stated age is the thread that ties together every other document in his file. Certificates, transcripts, admission forms, national records: all of them hang on a date of birth. When the date moves, everything attached to it moves with it. That is why the age question has never gone away, and why it has always been raised by serious people rather than by mischief makers.
Odumakin raised it and was called a traitor to his own. Enahoro-Ebah raised it and was buried in procedure. The old boys of Government College Ibadan raised it and cancelled their own reception. The record raised it against itself, and Wikipedia had to lock a page to keep the peace.
Atiku has now said he will raise it in the only forum that can settle it. Let the President welcome that.
A man with one age has nothing to fear from a courtroom. And the silence on that single sheet of paper, sustained for 27 years, is louder than every photograph they will ever post.
Ìgbà díẹ̀ ló kù. Lokaci kaɗan ne ya rage. Obere oge ka ọ fọdụrụ.
142 days to 16 January 2027.
AtikuAmaechi2027 #ADC2027 #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
28 August 2026
