Both pro- and anti-Tinubu news outlets and blogs are selectively reporting the documents that Chicago State University handed over to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar yesterday. Here are 6 non-partisan tidbits I discovered from poring over them:
1. Chicago State University’s
Office of the Registrar affirmed that Bola A. Tinubu indeed attended the
university “from August 1977 through June 1979” and was “awarded a Bachelor of
Science in Business Administration with Honors on June 22, 1979.”
The registrar also swore to this under oath.
The penalty for lying under oath in America can be steep. It is punishable by
up to 10 years in prison.
This information is consistent
with my September 2, 2023, column titled, “Tinubu Definitely Graduated from
Chicago State University.”
2. The certificate (we call it
“diploma” in the US) that Tinubu submitted to INEC is inconsistent with the
certificates CSU issued in 1979 and subsequently, indicating that Tinubu forged
his. (In the US, diplomas are mere ceremonial documents that most employers
don’t ask for. Transcripts directly from universities are the usual ways to verify
attendance and graduation.)
Although he did legitimately
graduate from Chicago State University in 1979, he obviously lost his
certificate and, instead of applying for a replacement, decided to forge it.
That strikes me as mysterious
self-harm. It costs only $26 to get a replacement diploma from CSU. But it
takes between eight and 10 weeks to receive it after filling out the Diploma
Replacement Order Form.
My guess is that, in the
typical last-minute, fire-brigade approach to things among Nigerian elites,
Tinubu didn’t plan ahead and didn't have enough time to apply for his
replacement diploma from CSU to meet INEC's deadline and decided to visit
Lagos’ infamous “Oluwole” for a counterfeit replacement.
3. The Southwest College
transcript that Tinubu used to get admitted to Chicago State University belongs
to a female. I had questioned the authenticity of the transcript because of the
many errors in it, such as the date and social security number. We await what
CSU has to say about this.
This reality, though, seems to
validate uncorroborated but long-standing whispers from the grapevine that
Tinubu, who was allegedly born Lamidi Amoda [Yoruba Muslim domestication of
Abdulhamid Ahmed] Sangodele in Osun State’s Iragbiji, stole the identity of a
female Bola Adekunle Tinubu to go to America.
4. Nonetheless, this whisper
may be difficult to sustain in light of the fact that Tinubu’s Chicago State University
admission letter dated August 23, 1977, was addressed to “Mr. Tinubu,” not Ms.
or Miss Tinubu.
Was the “F” in the transcript
from Southwest College a clerical error, especially because the social security
number and the dates were also clerical errors? Or was there a cover-up
somewhere?
Well, we saw from the documents
released to Atiku that after accepting his transfer credits from Southwest
College (which later became Daley College), CSU required Tinubu to take
qualifying exams in English, math, and reading, which he passed. Why did CSU
allow a man who presented a transcript that belonged to a woman to take
qualifying exams as a man?
Tinubu obviously identified as
a man throughout the two years he studied at the school. A Nigerian CSU graduate
and classmate of Tinubu’s swore under oath that Tinubu ran for and won election
as president of CSU's accounting students’ association. His yearbook photo from
1979 also clearly showed a younger version of Tinubu.
And Tinubu’s handwriting and signature in the
June 27, 2022, Consent to Release Student Education Records form, which
authorized CSU to release his academic records to one Oluwole Afolabi of 3
Roosevelt Avenue, West Orange, New Jersey, seems to me similar to his
handwriting and signatures in his CSU records.
Finally, if he used a woman’s
associate degree from Southwest College to gain admission to CSU without having
any background in accounting or business administration, his performance at CSU
was perplexing. Of the more than 30 courses he took there, he got C’s in only
three courses. The rest were A’s and B’s, which earned him honors.
5. The Bola A. Tinubu who
applied to Southwest College for an associate degree in 1975 claimed to have
attended Government College, Lagos, and presented a 1970 GCE A-level result
with grades E in Chemistry and Biology and an F in Physics. The problem is that
Government College, Lagos, was established in 1974. So, there’s a chronological
conundrum there, which signposts forgery.
The GCE A-level result also
shows that “Bola A. Tinubu” took the exam as an HSC student, which used to be a
two-year study after 5 years of secondary school education. In other words, the
owner of the certificate must have graduated from secondary school at least in
1968.
It’s not clear at the moment if
the GCE A-level result is fake or authentic—or if it belongs to the man we know
today as President Bola A. Tinubu. My hunch is that it doesn’t belong to him.
But this will become clear in the coming days.
6. Tinubu tells the world that
he was born on March 29, 1952, but the birthday recorded in his CSU transcript
says he was born on March 29, 1954. The space for birthday in the Southwest
College transcript he submitted to CSU is blank. So is the record of his
secondary school education. These facts added to my previous suspicion that the
transcript was probably fake.
If he was born in 1954, it
means he was 14 years old when he graduated from high school.
Bonus: Tinubu’s last name was
misspelled in a few of the CSU documents. I thought the “THUBV” misspelling in
his final graduation record was bad enough until I saw “Tinububu” in one of the
documents.? Bubu, remember, is Buhari’s nickname among a vast swath of Nigerians.
Make of that what you will.
We should all thank VP Atiku
Abubakar for his doggedness, which has helped us to get this much clarity about
Tinubu’s past.
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