Tinubu’s Result Forgery: Atiku To Hold World Press Conference

Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate for the People’s Democratic Party and a former vice president, has announced that he will hold a global press conference on the findings of his research at CSU on Thursday.

This comes after the registrar of Chicago State University (CSU), Mr. Caleb Westberg, testified in a court-ordered deposition in Illinois on Tuesday that despite President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s graduation from the institution, the university did not issue the diploma Tinubu submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for his bid for the presidency in 2023.

In a US court case, Westberg revealed the information in response to inquiries from Atiku Abubakar’s former lawyer Angela Liu.

Following the rejection of his petition challenging the February 25 election that elected Tinubu as president, he is currently appealing the decision at the Supreme Court.

On September 6, a five-member panel of the presidential election tribunal issued a unanimous decision finding that Atiku lacked the evidence necessary to support his claims of irregularities, noncompliance, and corrupt practices during the election.

Additionally, the panel rejected Atiku’s requests for Tinubu to be disqualified from the election due to allegations of forgery and perjury on the grounds that those claims were absent from the petition the former vice president filed on March 21, 2023.

According to Atiku’s interpretation of Nigerian law, a candidate could be disqualified from running in an election if they engaged in forgery or lied under oath.

A diploma certificate that was allegedly obtained from CSU in 1979 was included in the paperwork Tinubu submitted to INEC last year. The document was mired in intense controversy, much like his academic background, which prompted immediate legal action in the United States.

Aside from the US case, Mike Enahoro-Ebah and a few civil society organizations had previously sued to prevent Tinubu from running in the previous presidential election. Because the complaints or plaintiffs lacked the legal standing to bring the lawsuit, the various cases were dismissed.

In the tribunal, the former vice president asserted that the CSU certificate Tinubu provided to INEC was fake, just like in the earlier lawsuits filed at the High Court. He presented a copy of Tinubu’s certificate that he had obtained from the same CSU, which had different dates, logos, signatories, and fonts than the one Tinubu had submitted to INEC, as evidence of the alleged irregularities in the document. This witness, Enahoro-Ebah, also testified about the alleged irregularities in Tinubu’s certificate.

After the tribunal rejected his claim, Atiku petitioned a US court to issue an order requiring CSU to turn over Tinubu’s academic records so he could show the Nigerian supreme court that Tinubu had engaged in criminal forgery and perjury, which should have been grounds for the annulment of his presidency.

Atiku’s application had merit, according to the US court. On September 19, Judge Jeffrey Gilbert of a Magistrate Court ordered CSU to give Tinubu’s records to Atiku within two days. The records must be authenticated by a corporate designee of the school, who must also attest to their authenticity.

Last Saturday, Maldonado upheld the order by insisting that the documents be made public on Monday and that the witness’ testimony be obtained on Tuesday.

Westberg, however, revealed to the court during the deposition required by Rule 30(b)(6) that records at his disposal showed Tinubu attended and graduated from the CSU in 1979.

Cross-examination revealed that the deponent was unable to verify the diploma Tinubu submitted to INEC. The certificate, he claimed, was something he had never seen before.

“Exhibit 6,” which claims to be a diploma given to Tinubu on June 22, 1979, bears an INEC stamp. The witness was asked, “Have you seen this document before?”.

The witness concurred that there were notable differences between the diploma Tinubu submitted to INEC and those issued by the institution in 1979, the year Tinubu graduated, and the one issued last year to Enahoro-Ebah.

The signatories, the seal, and the logo were all different.

The witness noted in his deposition that certificates issued in 1979 had five signatories and a class of hands seal, but the one Tinubu submitted to INEC only had three signatories and a triangle seal.

Westberg specifically noted that Tinubu’s replacement certificate had a signature that was consistent with diplomas from the 1990s rather than those from 1979, and he added that some of the people who signed the INEC diploma had not yet joined the organization in 1979.

In a similar vein, the witness acknowledged that Herbert Conley was not the dean of the Faculty of Business Administration in 1979, despite identifying another signature on the diploma Tinubu submitted to INEC as his.

The witness claimed that the word “responsibility” and the year 1867 were missing from the INEC seal that was on the diploma, adding to the document’s flaws.

While the witness claimed, “We did not find any diploma issued by 1979 to Tinubu,” in another breath, he admitted that the school had the diploma dated June 27, 1979, which was the copy released last year to Enahoro-Ebah under the order of a US court, in its file.

The witness claimed that his assumption that Tinubu did not pick up the diploma was the reason they kept the copy from June 27, 1979 in their file.

The certification, however, that Tinubu provided to INEC was dated June 22, 1979.

When Tinubu asserted to have graduated from the university in 1979, Atiku had demanded all diplomas issued by the institution at that time, as well as the “true and correct copy” given to Tinubu at that time.

The PDP presidential candidate claimed that he was not disputing Tinubu’s attendance at CSU, but rather that the diploma he currently displays was a forgery.

Despite claims that he lost them while living in exile and that the late General Sani Abacha’s military regime was allegedly after some of them, Tinubu had failed to produce his academic transcripts from primary through secondary schools.

To a large extent, it was anticipated that the disclosure of Tinubu’s CSU records and the ensuing deposition would finally put an end to any lingering questions about the president’s educational background.

This revelation’s impact on the Supreme Court, however, is entirely different.

The academic records of Tinubu held by CSU were made public on Monday. Tinubu graduated from Government College in Lagos in 1970, according to the records that were made public. There were 32 documents in all.

Along with his university, Tinubu’s primary and secondary education was still a subject of intense debate.

Along with differences in the names and numbers of the signers on the various certificates issued in 1979, there were also significant variations in the institution’s logo.

A Southwest College transcript was one of the additional records made public by the university. Tinubu allegedly used this transcript to enroll in CSU in September 1977.

The paperwork backed up Atiku’s claim that the Tinubu admitted to CSU in 1977 was a female with the social security number 231-06-0595.

The document also revealed that Tinubu claimed to have earned a diploma from Lagos, Nigeria’s Government College, in 1970, in addition to Southwest College. The college, however, was not established until 1974.

In a similar vein, a University of Cambridge General Certificate of Education that Tinubu attached as proof of his credentials listed Physics, Chemistry, and Biology as the three subjects he registered for in the November/December 1970 exam.

The documents that were made public also revealed that, with Tinubu’s permission, his record was given to a Mr. Wole Afolabi on June 28, 2023. Jamar Orr, who also claimed last year that Tinubu graduated from the CSU in 1979, signed the document.