President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has urged a U.S court to hide his Chicago State University, CSU, records from Nigerian bloggers.
A court filings obtained by Peoples Gazette states that the president is afraid that bloggers would use the records on the said certificate to tarnish his reputation.
Tinubu has vehemently resisted a request for an order directing discovery of his CSU credentials, arguing that doing so would equate to giving Nigerian reporters access to information they may use to weaken his reputation.
According to the Nigerian president, previous records the school released in 2022 to Nigerian lawyer Mike Enahoro-Ebah have been turned into weapons by “bloggers to attack” his character.
Tinubu through his team of lawyers led by Oluwole Afolabi and Chicago-based Charles Carmichael on August 23 said: “If the purpose of the application is to uncover ‘opposition research’ or provide fodder fornews bloggers, then it is not proper.
“In politics, opposition research (also called oppo research) is the practice of collecting information on a political opponent or other adversary that can be used to discredit or otherwise weaken them,” the lawyers explained.
Atiku Abubakar, a candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the February 25 presidential election in Nigeria had asked the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to subpoena CSU into releasing Tinubu’s records in order to clarify glaring inconsistencies in his gender, graduation date, age and so on but the president desperately fighting 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.”
