Real Reason Tinubu Asked Chicago University To Release Only His Certificate To Atiku
Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, has appealed to the United States federal judge to allow only his university certificate to be given to his political opponent, Atiku Abubakar.
Naija News House reported on September 23, that Tinubu appealed against the ruling of Judge Jeffrey T. Gilbert, sitting at the United States’ District Court of Northern Illinois which ordered the Chicago State University (CSU) to release all relevant records pertaining to him to Nigeria’s former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar.
Naija News House had reported how the federal court in Chicago, while ruling on the civil case filed by Atiku Abubakar, recently, granted the applicant’s request to the court, stating that former Nigeria’s vice-president had been able to sufficiently satisfy the purpose for seeking the records.
As the legal battle intensified, Tinubu, on Monday pleaded with Judge Nancy Maldonado to block all other details, especially the gender and admission records, among others, of the person who owns the certificate from being disclosed, People’s Gazette reports.
Naija News House had reported that Abubakar brought the case before the court in a desperate effort to establish that Tinubu was not eligible to be Nigerian president despite his election in February 2023.
He won the election by 36 per cent of the vote after Abubakar and Peter Obi, who was his running mate in the 2019 election, fell out, subsequently dividing their potential votes into at least two parts, paving the way for Tinubu’s victory with the slimmest margin in Nigerian presidential election history.
President Tinubu’s acceptance that his certificate could be released came after he narrowly escaped full disclosure on September 21 by pleading severe harm to his life in order to obtain a stay of a magistrate judge’s order on September 19.
“There is harm in allowing discovery on issues and documents outside the diploma,” Tinubu’s lawyers said in their full briefing to the court seeking a review of Judge Jeffrey Gilbert’s order by Ms Maldonado, a district judge.
The identity of who was admitted into Chicago State University in the 1970s has been a hot issue after college transcripts emerged that indicated the school admitted a female Bola Tinubu from Southwest College Chicago in 1977.
Whereas Tinubu’s lawyers, led by Victor Henderson and Christopher Carmichael, insisted that the documents Abubakar sought wouldn’t be admissible at the Supreme Court, they nonetheless appeared to anticipate the potential for an unfavourable ruling and consequently gave the judge an alternative direction of giving only an order for the school to certify strictly the certificate the president tendered to run for election.
Gilbert’s ruling last week required CSU administrators to confirm under oath whether or not the certificate Tinubu tendered in Nigeria was genuine. Additionally, the officials were mandated to show a certificate issued to a CSU graduate in 1979, with the person’s identification redacted, and to also turn over communications relating to a letter the school issued to Tinubu in 2022.
Tinubu feared that allowing the deposition of CSU officials to go forward could inflict severe, irreparable damage to his life, saying Abubakar was only on a fishing expedition to fuel online conspiracy theories.
In today’s filing, a man, who identified himself as Olajide Adeniji, submitted an affidavit saying he attended school with Tinubu from 1977 to 1979.
