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.
The PUNCH had earlier reported 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.