No Evidence Tinubu Forged Certificate – BBC Fact-Checkers
The British Broadcasting Corporation BBC’s Global Disinformation Team has come up with a report that says that Nigerian President, Bola Tinubu, did not forge his certificate issued him by the Chicago State University in the United States.
The team, dedicated to fact-checking, said the Social Security Number in the transcript from Chicago varsity matched what it had in other documents in which Tinubu’s gender was marked as male.
There have been controversies over the academic records of the Nigerian president with his rivals, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party and Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party challenging the president to come forward with his ‘real’ identity.
Tinubu has insisted his records are clean.
Atiku had approached the Chicago State University demanding for the release of Atiku’s certificate and other records while at the university.
The university, which initially declined to release the records, was however compelled by a court to release the records.
Atiku had requested a copy of any diploma issued by the CSU in 1979; a copy of the diploma the CSU gave to Tinubu in 1979; copies of diplomas with the same font, seal, signatures, and wording awarded to other students that are similar to what CSU awarded to Tinubu in 1979; and documents from the CSU that were certified by Jamar Orr, who was then a staff member of university, in the 12 months from August 1, 2022.
“In line with the judge’s ruling, Mr Abubakar’s lawyer Angela Liu last week questioned Caleb Westberg, CSU’s current registrar, in a deposition.
“The BBC was given access to the deposition transcript by Mr Abubakar’s spokesperson, Phrank Shaibu.
Some social media users in Nigeria allege that the deposition and the diplomas released by CSU confirm that the diploma submitted to Inec by Mr Tinubu was forged. “This claim was also repeated by one of Mr Abubakar’s lawyers, Kalu Kalu, at a press conference last week.
“We found there was no evidence to support this claim,” the BBC reported.
The media organisation wrote further, “The CSU released several diplomas issued between 1979 and 2003. We analysed all of them.
There are three different diplomas for Mr Tinubu that we refer to throughout our analysis:
• The original one, from 1979, which he has said in the past was lost when he went into exile in the 1990s
• The second one, that he submitted to Inec – supposedly a replacement diploma from CSU (it is similar to diplomas issued by CSU in the 1990s)
• Additionally, CSU holds another replacement diploma for Mr Tinubu that they say is probably from the early 2000s that he never collected
The allegations on social media are based on a comparison between the document Mr Tinubu submitted to Inec and the 1979 diplomas released by CSU.
During Mr Westberg’s deposition, Mr Atiku’s lawyer focused on the copy of the diploma President Tinubu handed to the electoral commission and suggested that it was unlike any of the diplomas released by CSU.
However, while Mr Westberg agreed with Ms Liu that the diploma in question does not look like the samples from 1979, he stated that the certificate actually looks like three of the diplomas CSU released to Mr Abubakar. Our analysis confirms this.
It turns out that the discrepancy in the appearance of the diploma is down to it having been re-issued in the 1990s.
Mr Westberg said the template of CSU’s diploma has changed several times over the years. He said any request for a new diploma would resemble the current template at that time, no matter when the student graduated.
As such, if Mr Tinubu had reordered his diploma in the late 1990s, what he would have been given would look like what was obtainable then.