The President, Bola Tinubu has urged a U.S. court to conceal his Chicago State University (CSU) records because his reputation as Nigerian president is at risk of further being tainted by Nigerian bloggers, court filings obtained by Peoples Gazette show.
You will recall that President Tinubu has fiercely opposed an application for order to direct discovery of his CSU credentials, claiming that releasing them is tantamount to arming Nigerian bloggers with information to discredit and weaken his reputation.
According to Mr Tinubu, previous records the school released in 2022 to Nigerian lawyer Mike Enahoro-Ebah have been turned into weapons by “bloggers to attack” his character.
Mr Abubakar had asked the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to subpoena CSU into releasing Mr Tinubu’s records in order to clarify glaring inconsistencies in his gender, graduation date, age and so on but the president is fighting desperately to block the application.
While responding to a previous subpoena in 2022, CSU had provided Mr Ebah with records that showed a certain Bola Tinubu, born March 29, 1954, who attended the school at the same period as Mr Tinubu claimed in the 1970s, was a female. He also recently expunged his primary and secondary education from his records after it was discovered that the primary and secondary schools he listed under oath in his 1999 run for Lagos governor did not exist anywhere in Nigeria.
Mr Abubakar believed the requested records would show which early and high school papers Mr Tinubu submitted to CSU before he was admitted to study there.
CSU’s response was first published on independent journalist David Hundeyin’s website in 2022 where bloggers picked it up and circulated it to almost every Nigerian. The gender controversy dominated social platforms like Twitter, now called X, where majority questioned the eligibility of Mr Tinubu to run for presidency and raised concerns on the allegation of perjury.
