Posted by The legitimacy of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Diploma Certificate from Chicago State University, CSU, has been the subject of ongoing controversy.
The President utilized the certificate to get the All Progressives Congress’s (APC) final OK to run in the 2023 presidential election.
A top official at CSU, Mr. Carl Westberg, stated on Tuesday that the replacement copy of Tinubu’s Diploma certificate he gave to INEC was not issued by the University.
During these hearings, University Registrar Westberg testified under oath that he was seeing the Diploma certificate copy for the first time.
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), requested Tinubu’s academic records, and the subpoenaed witness testified in support of that request under oath at Judge Nancy Maldonado’s direction.
Atiku Abubakar, who ran for president on February 25, 2023 alongside Tinubu, had contested the APC candidate’s declaration as victor of the election.
Tinubu’s falsified documents submitted under oath to INEC disqualify him as a candidate for election, among other things.
Atiku filed a petition in a US District Court requesting that the university produce Tinubu’s academic records so that he could verify and authenticate his claim.
After his victory in court in the United States, the California State University (CSU) was ordered to hand him his academic records and provide a deposition from a CSU employee to prove that the data had been given to him.
Westberg, who testified under oath as required by the court, confirmed that the diploma certificate Tinubu claimed to have gotten from the university and utilized to get access to the presidential election was not an official document of the institution.
If we take Tinubu’s certificate to the electoral body as an example, the witness admitted that the Institution did not have a board of trustees in 1979, as Tinubu had claimed.
The witness conceded that there were discrepancies between the witness’s signature and the signatures on other certificates issued in 1979 and the one Tinubu submitted to INEC.
Westberg specifically mentioned that Tinubu’s replacement certificate matches signatures from the 1990s, not 1979, as the President had claimed.
Atiku is claiming that Tinubu forged documents, and he is waiting for a certified true copy of the deposition and cross-examination to prove it.
Remember that the Supreme Court of Nigeria is currently hearing the final portion of Atiku’s case, in which he is asking that Tinubu be disqualified from the 2023 presidential election.