Post by Chidinma Onyejiuwa (@Onyejiuwa)

Professor Anthony Kila Claims Fake Professorship? Any Connection to Tinubu?

For several years, Mr Anthony Kila has appeared on national television as a commentator on social and political affairs. He has been introduced as a professor, and his contributions have been marked by clarity, directness, and an evident regard for evidence, due process, and public accountability. Those qualities earned him a measure of trust among viewers.

That manner of commentary was on display as recently as 2 October 2026, when he appeared on Arise News to review President Bola Tinubu’s Independence Day address, “From Reform to Prosperity.” He did not simply accept or reject the speech. He argued that the claim of a passage from painful reform to stability and prosperity should be tested against daily life, not against GDP or the assessments of the IMF. He took up the address’s metaphors of long sickness and of “excising the cancer” of subsidies, and said that a change of direction is not the same as arrival. His proposed tests were the cost of food, the stability of electricity, access to credit, and jobs for graduates willing to work. He credited the administration with more predictable foreign-exchange costs, while noting that the rate is higher than when it took office. He added a test of “shared prosperity”: reforms create winners and losers, and the pain was not borne equally. On fuel subsidy, he recalled his opposition to removal under President Goodluck Jonathan during Occupy Nigeria, on economic rather than partisan grounds, and said the price and production effects then feared had come to pass. He also argued that an Independence Day speech should recall the history and vision of independence, not the record of the government of the day. He said he liked the content and disagreed with the timing.

That trust is now in question. An investigation published by Premium Times on 3 October 2026 reports that no recognised academic institution has awarded him the rank of professor. According to the report, Mr Kila attributes the title, held out since 2016, to the European Centre for Advanced and Professional Studies, a body the newspaper could not locate in the United Kingdom’s Companies House, Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission, or any other public record. The same investigation reports that the European Union agency responsible for the Jean Monnet programme has no record of him in that capacity, and that a number of works listed on his scholarly profile were not authored by him. He has rejected the report and said that documentation will be produced. As of this statement, that documentation has not been placed before the public.

The concern is not that a commentator has been criticised, nor that the substance of his reading of the Independence Day address was unsound. It is that a person who has consistently urged discipline, protocol, and scrutiny — and who, on that broadcast, asked that the President’s claims be tested against evidence — now stands accused of using a rank that a recognised university has not been shown to confer, while chairing the governing council of a Nigerian university and being presented to the public as an academic authority. If the finding is correct, it points to a wider failure of verification by media organisations and appointing institutions. Claims of this kind, including longstanding allegations concerning certificates associated with the Nigeria’s presidency, ought to be resolved by records rather than by repetition.

Mr Kila, Michael and Cecilia Ibru University, and the broadcasters that have used the title are therefore urged to publish the instrument of appointment, or to withdraw the title until such an instrument is produced. Public confidence in expert commentary depends on that minimum standard.

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