The Chicago State University has said in the testimony of the institution that Nigeria’s 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.
According to Peoples Gazette, the school officials during deposition on Tuesday rejected Tinubu’s certificate — the only academic qualification he presented to the electoral office.
An expanded transcript of the session is still being processed.
The registrar at Chicago State University, Caleb Westberg 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 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. .
