The Chicago State University has affirmed that President Bola Tinubu presented a forged degree certificate to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) when he filed his paperwork to lead Nigeria in June 2022.
Giving a sworn deposition on Atiku vs Tinubu case, the university on Tuesday stated that the documents stamped with CSU stamp was not done in the school.
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The school representative said “it is a Nigerian thing” to forge stamps of organizations.
The official repudiation of Tinubu’s certificate came at a deposition of school officials on Tuesday in Chicago.
Caleb Westberg, the registrar at Chicago State University, said Tinubu’s certificate, dated June 22, 1979, and tendered to INEC on June 17, 2022, was not issued by the school and its administrators could, therefore, not be able to authenticate its source.
Westberg, CSU’s registrar since November 2020, also said, during the deposition that lasted about 5.5 hours, that Mr Tinubu did not apply for a replacement certificate, nor was he ever issued one.
The categorical statement sealed a successful outcome for the months-long legal strategy of Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate who approached the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago to ascertain the authenticity or otherwise of the document.
Federal district judge Nancy Maldonado granted a final order for CSU administrators to turn over all documents relating to Mr Tinubu to the school and also sit down for deposition by an adversarial team of lawyers deployed by Mr Abubakar.
Tinubu, however, desperately fought to thwart its successful outcome, with his lawyers warning the judge in a September 21 hearing that releasing the documents with deposition would inevitably inflict severe, irreparable harm against the Nigerian president, People’s Gazette reports.
The school had long insisted that Mr Tinubu was its student, entering in 1977 and graduating in 1979, but its inability to authenticate the certificate the Nigerian president submitted would ripple through Nigeria’s over 200 million population for the foreseeable future.