Our reporter/ Officials of the the Chicago State University during deposition under oath, disowned the certificate Bola Tinubu presented to INEC to contest the 2023 Presidential election.
The officials denied the stamp and other items on the certificate and said they do not know where he got the certificate from.
The official repudiation of Tinubu’s certificate — the only academic qualification he presented to the electoral office — came at a deposition of school officials on Tuesday in Chicago. An expanded transcript of the session is still being processed, but sources that monitored the deposition has learnt about what has perhaps been the most crucial expectation of Nigerians: How the school would characterise Tinubu’s certificate under oath and penalty of perjury.
Caleb Westberg, the registrar at Chicago State University, 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 categorical statement capped a successful outcome for Atiku,’s monthslong legal strategy at the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago to ascertain the authenticity or otherwise of the document.
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.
The deposition of officials of the Chicago State University by Atiku Abubakar’s lawyers ended earlier on Tuesday before US Magistrate Judge, Jeffery Gilbert.
According to sources that monitored the proceedings, one of President Tinubu’s lawyers, Oluwole Afolabi , presented a document supposedly stamped with CSU insignia but CSU disowned the document.
The CSU lawyers were quoted to have said that, ‘it’s a Nigerian thing to forge documents’.
With PG report
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