News
Chicago State University nails Tinubu! Certificate he submitted to INEC forged, not from us
Published
2 months agoon

Chicago State University (CSU), on Tuesday, disowned the degree certificate President Bola Tinubu submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) during the filing for the 2023 presidential election, saying the document was not from the institution, a testimony that has now put him up for a credible case of perjury.
Perjury, is actually what Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 election, Tinubu’s nemesis, is trying to prove and not actually whether the President attended the institution, in his bid to disqualify him as a candidate in the election in which he was beaten to the second position now that the battle has shifted to the Supreme Court, from the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT).
The university, though acknowledged that Tinubu was its student and graduated from the institution, officially repudiated the document he submitted to the main electoral body came from it with Caleb Westberg, the Registrar at CSU, saying that Tinubu’s certificate, dated June 22, 1979, and tendered to INEC on June 17, 2022, was not issued by the school and its administrators could, therefore, not be able to authenticate its source. Mr Westberg, CSU’s Registrar since November 2020, also said, during the deposition that lasted about 5.5 hours, that the President did not apply for a replacement certificate, nor was he ever issued one, dealing what appeared a mortal blow to Tinubu, who tried to block the disclosure ordered by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago to ascertain the authenticity or otherwise of the document.
Two US judges, Jeffery Gilbert, of the Magistrate Court and Nancy Maldonado of the Federal District Court of Illinois in Chicago, had separately granted orders for CSU administrators to turn over all documents relating to the President’s school and also sit down for deposition by an adversarial team of lawyers deployed by Atiku.
This was after a spirited bid for Tinubu, to thwart its successful outcome, with his lawyers warning the judge in a September 21 hearing that releasing the documents with deposition would inevitably inflict severe, irreparable harm against the Nigerian president.
The school had long insisted that Tinubu was its student, entering in 1977 and graduating in 1979, but its inability to authenticate the certificate the Nigerian president submitted would ripple through Nigeria’s over 200 million population for the foreseeable future.
Previously in 1999, Tinubu had lied under oath when he ran for governor of Lagos, claiming he obtained a degree from the prestigious University of Chicago. However, he managed to escape being held accountable for the breach because he had been elected before it was discovered, and he did not submit a certificate backing his claim, only an affidavit that was later found to be fiction, and the Nigerian Supreme Court said he could not be charged with crimes as a serving governor. He subsequently stopped claiming attendance at the University of Chicago, holding on instead to a claim that he attended Chicago State University, one of Illinois State University campuses traditionally popular among black people.
A spokesman for the President was not immediately available for reaction to the development on Tuesday night. But the president’s allies have suggested publicly that the evidence was inconsequential and propagated the Supreme Court’s readiness to throw it out.
The president’s allies are also banking on the muddled circumstances of the president’s certificate spiel, believing his Nigerian lawyers would be able to convince the Supreme Court to focus more on the school’s position that Mr Tinubu was a student rather than how he came about parading a forged certificate.
On Monday evening, shortly after the school dumped records into the electronic filing portal used by lawyers to all parties, Tinubu’s team circulated a misrepresented account of the documents, successfully misleading some media outlets to run a claim that the school had authenticated Mr Tinubu’s certificate.
They also said a replacement was issued to Tinubu on June 27, 1997, in what seemed to be a reference to the certificate the school had submitted following a 2022 subpoena obtained from a state court by Nigerian lawyer Mike Enahoro-Ebah.
Enahoro-Ebah received the certificate, dated June 27, 1979, alongside all academic records of Mr Tinubu from CSU in August 2022. But the certificate was signed by Elnora Daniel and Niva Lubin, who were not at the school in 1979 and carried June 27, 1979, as its issuance date.
After comparing the certificate he was given by CSU to the certificate Mr Tinubu submitted to INEC, dated June 22, 1979, Mr Enahoro-Ebah promptly returned to Nigeria with the records and filed a criminal complaint against Mr Tinubu for forgery. But the case was stalled in an Abuja court for months before the election and has not been heard even months after the election.
Atiku used the conflicting records to approach the federal court in Chicago for a subpoena as part of his ongoing case against Mr Tinubu in Nigeria, culminating in Tuesday’s deposition that established Mr Tinubu forged his certificate in violation of the Constitution.
Tinubu was narrowly declared the winner of the February 25 presidential election, and he was only sworn in on May 29. But today’s development could all but mark a putative end to his presidency due to the constitutional proscription against the submission of a fake certificate to the electoral office.
Section 137 (1)(j) of the Nigerian Constitution (amended in 2010) specifically stated that no one would be legitimately elected president of Nigeria if the person “has presented a forged certificate to the Independent National Electoral Commission.”
The records obtained from the school, the deposition and other material collected through the U.S. legal system are now being prepared for onward submission to the Nigeria Supreme Court, where a final decision on the presidential election challenge would be made on or before December 6, 2023.
While the evidence may appear overwhelming to a plurality of Nigerians, its acceptance would still need to cross a formidable hurdle at the Supreme Court. This is because the court has conventionally rejected the introduction of new material at the top court level that was not previously argued during the initial trial.
Abubakar himself admitted before two U.S. judges who heard his discovery application that it would be a daunting challenge to convince the Supreme Court to accept the files, yet not entirely improbable.
Abubakar lost at the Court of Appeal, the initial court for presidential election disputes, when a panel of five judges on September 6 said his petition was too weak to overturn Mr Tinubu’s election.
Tinubu’s lawyers, in the U.S., argued against granting Mr Abubakar’s application to extract their client’s records over an admissibility challenge. But Ms Maldonado, nonetheless, said in her September 30 judgement that the records should be released, and any questions about usefulness would be answered by the Nigerian Supreme Court.
Abubakar filed the application to obtain Mr Tinubu’s CSU records and depose its officials on August 2, 2023, coming under Section 1782, the statute that allows the U.S. to turn over records “for use in a proceeding before a foreign tribunal.”
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N15billion VP’s residence: Stop whining, you’re a hypocrite, Shettima attacks Obi
Published
21 hours agoon
December 6, 2023
“President Tinubu and Vice President Shettima have left no stone unturned since they assumed office in the bid to wriggle the country out of the economic and social morass it had been enmeshed in. Under their watch, within a period of seven months, Nigeria’s foreign policy process and international relations have been reinforced with commendable results.”
These were the exact words, with which Vice President, Kashim Shettima, pushed back against attacks from Nigerians over the N15billion proposed by Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), for the completion of the official residence of the Vice President in Abuja, saying those kicking against the project, were not being sincere.
He particularly lashed out at Peter Obi, former Governor of Anambra State and presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the February 25, 2023 election, accusing him of speaking out of the pains he still felt over his defeat by President Bola Tinubu and himself, who ran on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
The VP wondered why the same Obi, who had as governor, ordered the completion of abandoned projects during his tenure in Anambra would rail against the same move by the Tinubu administration, saying it smacked of hypocrisy on his part, as the project in question came about not because he wanted to live in a new house but that the current government at the federal level desired to complete projects abandoned by previous governments.
In a statement signed by Stanley Nkwocha, his spokesman, the VP, admonished Obi to quietly lick his wounds from his defeat rather than whining endlessly over every move of the Tinubu administration, which he said were bold steps being taken in its determination to turn things around for the country.
The full statement, read: “We have taken note of statements credited to presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 presidential election, Mr. Peter Obi, in which he made yet another frail and futile attempt to paint the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration in bad light.
“For good 24 hours, Obi danced naked in the public square, trying to curry the attention of those who care to listen to his falsehood and warped opinions about waste. On Sunday, he accused the current administration of sponsoring over 1,400 delegates to Dubai for COP28.
“The next day, being Monday, the subject of his new found passion – armchair criticism – after his colossal loss at the presidential poll was the proposed N15.5 billion budgeted by the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) to renovate the house of the Vice President, which he claimed would pay the annual salary of 3,000 University Professors.
“Ordinarily, we wouldn’t have bothered to gratify Peter Obi with a response, especially when it is obvious that the Labour Party candidate is an unhealthy subject to post-election trauma.But it has become necessary to put the records straight. In his recent tirade against President Tinubu and his deputy, Vice President Kashim Shettima, Obi started another series of self-aggrandizement aimed at convincing Nigerians that he is the only person who has their interest at heart. But a clear shift of the veil will reveal deeply a man who is still sobbing after his woeful loss in the 2023 presidential election.
“For the records, unlike the “most brilliant, all knowing and Nigeria’s mirific but never-had President,” Mr Peter Obi, both President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima, have never claimed to know it all or exhibit anything close to perfection in their dealings. If anything, they have always submitted to their human nature, leaving perfection to the Almighty God only.
“Giving the reactions and invocations generated by Mr Obi’s comments, however, it is necessary for the sake of history to clarify that the proposed plan for the construction of the Vice President’s official residence, for which budgetary allocation was made in the 2024 budget by the FCT Administration, was awarded by the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan. It was not originated by the present administration. This, Mr Obi, knows but chose to play dumb all in a bid to inflamate a targeted group of Nigerians and, as usual, score cheap political goals, accolades and praises.
“The project, which was reinitiated in 2010 and was funded by the Jonathan administration, was abandoned. Appalled by the sorry state of the uncompleted building that was now overtaken by weeds and reptiles over a decade after construction started about 13 years ago, the current FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, felt it would be a waste to allow such a project started with public funds to continue to lie fallow; thus, in his wisdom and without the prompting of the Vice President, decided to resuscitate the building.
“We invite more cerebral Nigerians to crosscheck properly which should be considered a waste between Obi’s tantrums because the project has attracted government’s attention, given the decision by the current administration to complete vital abandoned projects. What is more wasteful and reckless than abandoning an edifice to rot and depreciate despite the amount that has been sunk into it over the years?
“We recall that while Obi was governor of Anambra State, he had insisted that contractors should return to site to complete abandoned projects, which he then never considered as a waste. If he did this while deploying ‘entailed wisdom and leadership’ to Ndi Anambra as a governor, the question now is: why should the same action by the Tinubu administration now be termed blue murder?
“Nigerians know that the issue of a befitting residence for the Vice President had been a recurring decimal in the budget of Nigeria since 2007. It did not start today, same for residences of the Senate President and the Speaker. The array of abandoned Federal Government projects littered all over the country is a national embarrassment that the current administration has taken a bold step to save the country from. This is why it has made it a priority that all abandoned projects must be completed before new ones are initiated, save for some on exceptional basis, either because of the need for strategic alignment or economic significance.
“Comparing the amount budgeted for the residence of the VP and salaries paid to Professors is an analogy taken too far. This is the only government that has repeatedly made it clear that the welfare of lecturers is paramount and the need to increase the budget of the educational sector is a gradual process in the face of the daunting security challenges it met on ground.
This same government directed that the backlog of salaries owed both teaching and non-teaching staff of universities be paid immediately despite the ‘no work, no pay’ order, while negotiations for their welfare continue in view of a wage package in 2024. The introduction of a student’s loan scheme is also a masterstroke that is targeted at ensuring that nobody, no matter his/her status, will be denied the right to quality education.
“Taking into cognisance the recent inflation rate, which has become a global phenomenon that Nigeria is not immune to, budgetary provisions are estimates aimed at advancing monies to complete projects that have bearings on the lives of the people. That the amount budgeted for various sectors are deemed to be on the high side is not unconnected with inflationary trends as being witnessed the world over. And since Mr Obi has qualms with this, he may as well explain to Nigerians why despite being a self acclaimed billionaire he and his likes continue importing all manner of junks, including toothpicks to sell to Nigerians all in a bid for his NEXT business empire to flourish at the detriment of our foreign exchange and economy.
“Curiously, it is under the Tinubu administration that Obi has suddenly “become a man,” with a shrill voice in the opposition camp. His claim about Nigerians needing leaders willing to make sacrifices for the nation’s development smacks of hypocrisy of the highest order. It appears the former Anambra State governor has forgotten so soon reports about the plethora of contracts he awarded in the twilight of his administration, including road contracts worth over N30 billion he awarded within a record period of three weeks.
“Nigerians have also not forgotten the investigation by the global International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)-led Pandora Papers project which linked Obi to a number of secret business deals and relationships that he kept top secret, including businesses he surreptitiously set up and operated overseas. He later admitted that he did not declare these companies and the funds because he wasn’t aware that he was expected to declare assets or companies he jointly owns with his family members or anyone else as provided by the law.
“There is no other context to situate Obi’s sermon about waste other than the fact that he has refused to swallow the bitter pills of reality. It is pitiful that since he was mercilessly defeated by President Tinubu, he and his army of social media cohorts have continued to brazenly unleash a campaign of calumny against the President and now, his administration.
“But despite Obi’s divisive rhetoric, Nigerians have since put a final seal on religious and ethnic politicking so that the country can move forward against the wish of certain persons in the mold of Obi who have continued to fan the embers of division and falsehood just to create tension and spurn vexatious narratives in the polity.
“They have turned themselves into marketers-in-chief to attract direct foreign investments, all in a bid to turn around the nation’s economic fortune for good. But the likes of Obi have not for once applauded these efforts. Still labouring under post-election trauma, the Labour Party candidate and his ilk are bent on pulling down the Tinubu administration at all cost.
“We advise him and his fellow travellers in the opposition to accept defeat honourably, and put the interest of Nigeria and Nigerians first as patriotic citizens they claim to be. Nigerians are not so gullible to be hoodwinked by statements that fly in the face of common sense. Our candid advice for him is that he should join hands with the current administration in nation building instead of all these red herrings he is throwing around.
The Vice President is a very busy man. He has committed himself to serving Nigeria and helping President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to achieving his set goals and objectives. As his work attitude and skills speak to, Senator Kashim Shettima is a very serious-minded leader. He is not into dubious or phony politics of statistics manipulation or mind games. Leadership, to him, is a serious business and not a circus show!”




News
Kaduna bombing: How I lost 34 family members – witness *After the first, they returned to cause the main havoc
Published
1 day agoon
December 5, 2023
“As we rushed to aid the injured, the jet returned, unleashing a second bomb, this time, many of those who had come to help were among the casualties,” were the exact words with which Idris Dahiru used to paint the gory incident of the massacre of his kinsmen after the bombing of his community by soldiers from the Nigerian Army.
Dahiru, who claimed he lost 34 of his family members in the incident to which Taoreed Lagbaja, Chief of Army Staff (COAS), attributed to mistaken identity as the operatives mistook them for bandits, said there was an initial attack in which the first set of victims were torn to shreds where others escaped death by the whiskers.
Stating that it was when rescuers from the village, who initially dispersed for dear life, returned to help the wounded that the more devastating attack happened as the soldiers returned to drop more bumbs.
Lagbaja, a Lieutenant General, who led other military top brass to commiserate with the community, where he donated N10million to help victims of the attack which occurred on Sunday, had told his hosts, “Having trailed them for sometimes, the decision was taken to conducts a strike based on the observations of tactics usually employed by bandits. Unfortunately, the report we got thereafter revealed that it was innocent civilians in Tudun Biri that the drone carried out the strike on.”
Stating that the reason for the urgent and essential visit to the village was to commiserate with the community on the unfortunate incident, Lagbaja assured them that a thorough investigation had commenced on the matter even before the directive to that effect by President Bola Tinubu.
Dahiru, who spoke with the BBC Hausa, said the bombing, which went off without notice killing many people, disrupted their Maulud celebration, adding: “Unexpected airstrikes shattered our annual Maulud celebration. The first bomb exploded without warning, killing innocent people, including women and children, the blast tore apart some victims.
“My family alone has lost 34 members in this tragedy. We have 66 loved ones receiving medical care at Barau Dikko Hospital.”
December 6, 2023 9:06 pm


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