Chicago varsity vindicates Tinubu, Presidency insists, Atiku files documents today.
The Presidency on Wednesday insisted that the academic records released by Chicago State University, United States, had vindicated President Bola Tinubu and confirmed him as an alumnus of the school.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Public Affairs, Temitope Ajayi, also submitted that the CSU never said the certificate presented to the Independent National Electoral Commission before the presidential election by Tinubu was forged in its deposition.
Having obtained Tinubu’s academic records on the order of an Illinois, Chicago court, former Vice President Abubakar Atiku would on Thursday (today) file his application at the Supreme Court.
Atiku, who contested against Tinubu in the February presidential election on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, is expected to file the documents he obtained from the CSU in furtherance of his election appeal at the Supreme Court.
reports that the university released the academic records of the President on Monday and the CSU Registrar, Carl Westberg, also carried out a deposition of the documents on Tuesday, in compliance with the ruling of Magistrate Jeffrey Gilbert.
Gilbert had on September 19 granted Atiku’s request for the release of Tinubu’s academic records but the President filed a review of the order.
Tinubu’s lawyers insisted that the documents would not be relevant in Atiku’s appeal against Tinubu at the Supreme Court and asked for a review of the ruling.
However, federal judge Nancy Maldonado overruled Tinubu’s objections and ordered the CSU to release the President’s academic records.
In the CSU documents, the institution responded to Atiku’s four requests and affirmed that Tinubu attended the CSU.
But taking to his account on the X micro-blogging platform on Wednesday, the presidential media aide dismissed reports that the CSU disowned Tinubu in its deposition.
Ajayi wrote, “We should be clear. In the deposition made by the Chicago State University, there was nowhere the university said the certificate presented to INEC by President Tinubu is fake.’’
He added, “The university insisted under oath that President Tinubu graduated with honours and even at that, replacements for lost certificates are done by vendors, not the university.
“The claim that President Tinubu submitted a fake certificate to INEC does not make sense. A man cannot forge the academic records he possesses. You can only forge what you don’t have.”
Addressing the issue for the first time, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, downplayed the controversies surrounding the educational qualification of the President.
He said the Federal Government was not wasting time on Atiku’s case in the US, describing it as frivolous.
The Tinubu administration, he noted, did not have time to waste on the certificate issue, which he described as “a trivial matter” and a distraction.
Tuggar, speaking on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Wednesday, said the President had met with other world leaders despite the controversy and the issue had not been a subject of discussion in all his recent international engagements.
“The foreign leaders that we’ve been engaging and the international organisations clearly are disinterested in wasting time on such. We pay no mind to that,” Tuggar said.
He added that it was not surprising that the issue had been a subject of discussion in the Nigerian space, adding that former President Muhammadu Buhari faced a similar thing.
The minister said, “There is a tendency to always try to distract and detain people on such frivolous issues as opposed to facing the major issues of development. We don’t have time to waste on that.
“Nobody is wasting time about certificate qualification for somebody who has been a Governor of a State, served two terms, and has been on the national stage as a politician.’’
