In the United States, Bola Tinubu has reluctantly told the federal judge to give his college diploma to Atiku Abubakar, who ran against him in the last election.
In a twist of events, Tinubu begged Judge Nancy Maldonado not to reveal any other information about the person who owns the certificate, especially their gender and any records of where they went to school, among other things.
The legal fight going on at the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago was the subject of Mr. Tinubu’s prayers on Monday morning.
Mr. Abubakar brought the case because he wanted to show that Mr. Tinubu was not qualified to be Nigeria’s president, even though he was elected in February 2023.
He won the very unfair election with 36% of the vote after Mr. Abubakar and Peter Obi, who was his running mate in 2019, got into a fight. This split their possible votes into at least two groups, which gave Mr. Tinubu the narrowest victory margin in the history of the Nigerian presidential election.
Mr. Tinubu agreed that his certificate could be released after almost being fully revealed on September 21. He narrowly avoided this by claiming serious harm to his life on September 19 in order to get a stay of a magistrate judge’s order.
“There is harm in allowing discovery on issues and documents outside the diploma,” Mr. Tinubu’s lawyers told the court in their full briefing as they asked Ms. Maldonado, a district judge, to review Judge Jeffrey Gilbert’s order.
There has been a lot of talk about who got into Chicago State University in the 1970s since college papers showed that the school accepted a Bola Tinubu from Southwest College Chicago in 1977.
Victor Henderson and Christopher Carmichael, who were Mr. Tinubu’s attorneys, claimed that the Supreme Court would not accept the documents Mr. Abubakar requested. However, they seemed to be planning for a possible negative outcome, so they gave the judge an alternative direction: they told the school to strictly certify the president’s certificate to run for office.
Soon, more details…