By Matilda Ikediobi
Mr Liborous Oshoma is a lawyer. In this interview monitored on Channels TV, Oshoma spoke on the alleged certificate forgery issue against former Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Uche Nnaji.
What are your thoughts, legally speaking, about the Department of State Services, DSS, arresting him and handing him over to the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC?
First, we must thank, I think it was Premium Times that actually did a very detailed investigative investigation on this matter and broke the news. Typical of our politician, at the initial stage, there was a whole lot of grandstanding from him. He even submitted a petition to the Minister of Education for investigation against the University of Nigeria Nsukka on the grounds that they illegally altered his certificate and disclosed it to third parties. I think it was a 32 or 24 member panel that was set up, and after investigation, they came up with the fact that truly, the certificate was not only forged, but the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC also.
So, the issue now is, if you use all of this certificate to get appointments from Federal Government, and all through that time, you drew salaries from office, under the presumption that you truly graduated from that university, shouldn’t it be normal that federal government should also be asking for the action that he took while in office? Because it’s like impersonation, you are impersonating a graduate. The salaries that he drew from office, he should return those salaries, and then, also, even though there’s presumption of regularity in his favour, whilst at the time he was minister, there was presumption that, yes, truly, every other thing had been done, but the question now is that there were certain actions that he took in office, that federal government also needs to look at.
