A befuddled Judge Jeffrey Gilbert of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on Tuesday reserved judgement on the subpoena application for President Bola Tinubu’s records, after learning that the college transcript, which he used to gain admission into Chicago State University in 1977, indicated it belonged to a female.
The judge said he was prepared to rule on the matter when he scheduled a hearing for September 12, but he needed additional time to digest his decision after learning that there was a transcript bearing Bola A. Tinubu released by CSU under a separate court subpoena that carried the owner’s gender as female.
The female issue was raised by Tinubu’s lawyer, Christopher Carmichael, who tried to use it to demonstrate the frivolity of the case before the court, dismissing it as a fishing expedition based entirely on a conspiracy theory being peddled in Nigeria by Mr Tinubu’s political detractors.
But Alexandre de Gramont, lawyer to plaintiff Atiku Abubakar, quickly informed the court that the possibility of Bola Tinubu, who attended CSU in the same 1970s, being a woman was first revealed in records produced by the school itself.
The school had, in mid-2022, submitted Tinubu’s records in its possession while complying with a state court subpoena.
The records, handed over to Nigerian civil rights lawyer Mike Enahoro-Ebah, showed that Bola A. Tinubu was admitted into CSU in 1977 based on a transcript from Southwest College Chicago that was marked as belonging to a female.
Judge Gilbert became confused after CSU lawyer Michael Hayes confirmed that the school had indeed turned in records to Mr Enahoro-Ebah in 2022, but insisted that Mr Tinubu, the Nigerian president, was the one who attended and graduated from the school.
Mr Hayes, however, said he could not explain the contradictions, and the school’s administrators would not be able to state under oath that the certificate Mr Tinubu has been parading was genuine or otherwise
