The Chicago State University have said in their testimony that the president of Nigeria, Bola Tinubu submitted a forged certificate to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) when he applied to become the country’s leader in June 2022.
The only academic certificate Tinubu offered to the electoral office was his certificate, which the school officials reportedly rejected during deposition on Tuesday.
The session’s expanded transcript is still being prepared.
Tinubu’s certificate, dated June 22, 1979, and submitted to INEC on June 17, 2022, was not issued by Chicago State University, according to Caleb Westberg, the registrar there, 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 Tinubu did not apply for a replacement certificate, nor was he ever issued one.
The CSU’s registrar’s testimony is coming after the Federal district judge, Nancy Maldonado granted a final other for CSU administrators to turn over all documents relating to Tinubu to the school and also sit down for deposition by an adversarial team of lawyers deployed by Atiku Abubakar of the People Democratic Party (PDP).
Tinubu had vigorously fought to thwart the proceeding 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.
The school had long insisted that 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.
The records obtained from the school, the deposition and other material collected through the U.S. legal system are now being prepared for onward submission to the Nigeria Supreme Court, where a final decision on the presidential election challenge would be made on or before December 6, 2023.
Ada Peter
