President Bola Tinubu has told the federal judge in the United States to release only his university certificate to the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 elections, Atiku Abubakar.
This is part of the ongoing legal battle unfolding at the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago.
The president on Monday, however, pleaded with Judge Nancy Maldonado to block all other details, especially the gender and admission records, among others from being accessed by Atiku the PDP.
Tinubu’s acceptance that his certificate be released came after he narrowly escaped full disclosure on September 21 by pleading severe harm to his life in order to obtain a stay of a magistrate judge’s order on September 19.
“There is harm in allowing discovery on issues and documents outside the diploma,” Tinubu’s lawyers said in their full briefing to the court seeking a review of Judge Jeffrey Gilbert’s order by Maldonado, a district judge.
The identity of who was admitted into Chicago State University in the 1970s has been a hot issue after college transcripts emerged that indicated the school admitted a female Bola Tinubu from Southwest College Chicago in 1977.
Whereas Tinubu’s lawyers, led by Victor Henderson and Christopher Carmichael, insisted that the documents Atiku sought wouldn’t be admissible at the Supreme Court, they nonetheless appeared to anticipate the potential for an unfavourable ruling and consequently gave the judge an alternative direction of giving only an order for the school to certify strictly the certificate the president tendered to run for election.
Gilbert’s ruling last week required Chicago State University administrators to confirm under oath whether or not the certificate Tinubu tendered in Nigeria was genuine.
Additionally, the officials were mandated to show a certificate issued to a CSU graduate in 1979, with the person’s identification redacted, and to also turn over communications relating to a letter the school issued to Tinubu in 2022.
