Bola Tinubu, the president of Nigeria and the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate for president in the election scheduled for February 25, 2023, reportedly accused Chicago State University’s clerk of being to blame for the obvious irregularities present in a certificate the university reprinted in his name.
President Tinubu expressed this worry in a court file that was noticed by the platform, according to Peoples Gazette.
According to President Tinubu, the unnamed clerk made mistakes about the dates the school listed on his freshly issued certificate and when he graduated, resulting in “the appearance of differences.”
Tinubu Seeks To Stop Atiku’s Petition Over His Academic Records
In support of his position before the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, President Tinubu’s statement was submitted on August 23 by his attorney.
Judge Jeffrey Gilbert had ordered Tinubu till August 23 to provide justification for withholding Atiku Abubakar’s access to his CSU academic records.
Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) presidential candidate, requested court permission earlier this month to subpoena Tinubu’s files housed at CSU because he thought the records would explain glaring discrepancies in Tinubu’s background, including publicly available records suggesting that the CSU in the 1970s may have admitted a female student with Bola Tinubu who was born on March 29, 1954.
A U.S. law that permits papers to be available in the U.S. to be subpoenaed for use as evidence in a foreign court was used by Atiku to file a lawsuit to get Tinubu’s educational records.
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The former vice president said that Tinubu had made contradicting statements in Nigeria and that the CSU had produced papers in response to a previous subpoena that refuted what Tinubu had sworn to in Nigeria.
Oluwole Afolabi and Christopher Carmichael, two of Tinubu’s attorneys, said that the August 2022 subpoena, which was issued in response to a request by Nigerian attorney Mike Enahoro-Ebah, was “illegal” since it lacked a proper justification, particularly in light of education privacy rights.
Despite this, the solicitors acknowledged that the CSU had produced the records, but claimed that the graduation date had been written incorrectly by an anonymous clerk.
“Unfortunately, in responding to the illegal and invalid subpoena, CSU made several errors,” Mr Tinubu’s attorneys said. “CSU issued a new diploma for Bola A. Tinubu, but incorrectly wrote the date of graduation as June 27, 1979.”
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Aside from other oddities like the certificate’s fonts, the lawyers claimed that modifications to school-authorized signatories and logos also contributed to the appearance of impropriety.
“The correct date was June 22, 1979, but that scrivener’s error – along with a change in the CSU logo, the font on the diploma, and leadership at CSU who signed the diploma created the appearance of differences between an earlier issued diploma and the one issued in response to the 2022 subpoena,” the lawyers said.
Atiku claimed he brought the lawsuit in order to have the institution authenticate all of Tinubu’s documents, some of which had been submitted to a Nigerian court by the nation’s president’s attorneys as part of the ongoing election petitions hearing.
However, Tinubu contended that Abubakar ought to be asking for the documents because Tinubu’s academic records were not involved in the initial dispute over the Nigerian elections.
They said that the opposition leader’s defence concentrated solely on election fraud and other issues.
See How Nigerians Reacted As Chicago University Reveals When Tinubu Graduated
Additionally, they claimed that the Nigerian court handling the election petitions had already finished hearing arguments and that a decision was immediately expected.
According to the Nigerian electoral law, which stipulates that a petition must be resolved within 180 days of the election, the court is scheduled to issue its decision on or before September 21.
The presidential election took place on February 25; Mr. Tinubu took office on May 29.
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