There is no evidence that the Chicago State University’s
academic certificates of President Bola Tinubu submitted to the Independent
National Electoral Commission for the 2023 presidential election were forged,
the BBC’s Global Disinformation Team reports.
Recall that the university released
Tinubu’s academic records, which went viral on social media but were tagged as
fake by some opposition party leaders and members, especially his main rivals,
Labour Party’s Peter Obi and the Peoples Democratic Party’s Atiku Abubakar.
The quest to release Tinubu’s academic documents led to the
case filed by Atiku at the US court, where he accused him of falsifying the CSU
diploma of Bachelor of Science in Business Administration awarded in 1979 that
he submitted to INEC.
In the trial, the documents Atiku demanded included a copy
of any diploma issued by the CSU in 1979; a copy of the diploma the CSU gave to
Tinubu in 1979; copies of diplomas with the same font, seal, signatures, and
wording awarded to other students that are similar to what CSU awarded to
Tinubu in 1979; and documents from the CSU that were certified by Jamar Orr,
who was then a staff member of university, in the 12 months from August 1,
2022.
But Tinubu’s lawyers insisted that the documents would not
be relevant in Atiku’s appeal against Tinubu at the Supreme Court.
The magistrate, Jeffrey Gilbert, however ordered the CSU to
provide all relevant and non-privileged documents to Atiku’s legal team within
two days.
But, according to the BBC’s findings, the Social Security
Number in the transcript from Chicago varsity matched what it had in other
documents in which Tinubu’s gender was marked as male.
The released documents raised questions about Tinubu’s birth
date and his secondary school. One of the documents stated that Tinubu attended
Government College Lagos in 1970. However, information available on the school
website states that it was only founded in 1974.
The British medium also reported that aside from the gender
discrepancy, the birth dates in some of the released documents differed from
the official birth date of President Tinubu, which is March 29, 1952.
According to it, Tinubu’s transcript from the CSU has his
date of birth as March 29, 1954, while his undergraduate admissions application
form had his date of birth as March 29, 1955.
Meanwhile, the BBC report claimed that Atiku’s lawyer
questioned the date of birth on the certificate during Westberg’s deposition on
the forms submitted to INEC because Tinubu was said to have given his date of
birth as March 29, 1952.
Westberg, during cross-examination, the report said, responded
that the discrepancies could have been due to a human error.
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