The BBC’s Global Disinformation Team has said it found no evidence that the Chicago State University diploma certificate President Bola Ahmed Tinubu submitted to the country’s electoral commission was forged.
To obtain evidence for his case in Nigeria, Abubakar had approached a US court in August, requesting it to compel CSU to release Tinubu’s academic records ahead of a trial at the apex court. In response to request three, CSU stated that it produced for Mr Tinubu a replacement diploma dated 27 June 1979. It also released diplomas awarded to other students that bore similar font, seal, signatures and wordings as Mr Tinubu’s diplomas.
According to the BBC report, some people in Nigeria believe that the deposition and the diplomas released by CSU confirm that the diploma submitted to INEC by Mr Tinubu was forged. This claim was also repeated by one of Mr Abubakar’s lawyers, Kalu Kalu, at a press conference.It added that the CSU released several diplomas issued between 1979 and 2003 and the team analysed all of them. BBC said there are three different diplomas for Tinubu that it refers to throughout its analysis.
But BBC said in his deposition, Mr Westberg stressed that there was no confusion about the gender of the person who attended CSU as he was a male named Bola A. Tinubu. He said the university used other factors other than the name to authenticate the student’s identity. However, Mr Westberg, during cross-examination, responded that the discrepancies could have been due to human error.
According to Peter Obi, Tinubu should not leave his identity to be defined by his aides, adding that even the international community will want to know his true identity. According to him, in addition to the barrage of media frenzy that the matter has triggered at home and abroad, he has had the unwholesome burden of responding to embarrassing questions about Nigeria’s overall credibility as a nation to privileged audience and individuals both at home and abroad in different parts of the world where he had traveled to lately.