President Bola Tinubu reluctantly agreed to let his political rival Atiku Abubakar to receive his degree from a federal judge in the United States.
However, the Nigerian president urged with Judge Nancy Maldonado to suppress all other information, particularly the owner of the certificate’s gender and admissions history, among other things.
The continuing legal dispute taking place at the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago was a factor in Mr. Tinubu’s prayers on Monday morning.
The case was filed by Mr. Abubakar, who has been fighting in court to prove that Mr. Tinubu was not qualified to be president of Nigeria despite being elected in February 2023.
After Mr. Abubakar and Peter Obi, who was his running mate in the 2019 election, fell out, their potential votes were split into at least two parts, which allowed Mr. Tinubu to win with the narrowest margin in Nigerian presidential election history (36% of the vote).
After narrowly avoiding full disclosure on September 21 by claiming serious bodily harm to himself in order to gain a stay of a magistrate judge’s ruling on September 19, Mr. Tinubu agreed that his certificate might be revealed. This happened after he narrowly avoided it on September 20.
“There is harm in allowing discovery on issues and documents outside the diploma,” Mr Tinubu’s attorneys argued in their thorough file to the court in support of their request for Ms. Maldonado, a district judge, to review Judge Jeffrey Gilbert’s order.
After college transcripts showed that the school enrolled a female Bola Tinubu from Southwest College Chicago in 1977, the identities of those admitted to Chicago State University in the 1970s became a heated topic.
Although Mr. Tinubu’s attorneys, Victor Henderson and Christopher Carmichael, insisted that the documents Mr. Abubakar requested wouldn’t be admissible at the Supreme Court, they nonetheless seemed to anticipate a potential unfavourable ruling and as a result gave the judge an alternative direction of only giving an order for the school to strictly certify the certificate the president tendered to run for election.
According to Mr. Gilbert’s decision from last week, CSU administrators had to swear under oath that the certificate Mr. Tinubu presented in Nigeria was authentic. The officials were also required to provide communications pertaining to a letter the university sent to Mr. Tinubu in 2022 as well as a certificate granted to a CSU graduate in 1979 with the graduate’s identity deleted.
Mr. Abubakar was just on a fishing expedition to feed online conspiracy ideas, according to Mr. Tinubu, who believed that permitting the deposition of CSU officials to proceed could cause terrible, irreparable damage to his life.
In the document filed today, a man who went by the name Olajide Adeniji claimed in an affidavit that he went to school from 1977 to 1979 with Mr. Tinubu.
