There is another twist to the legal battle between President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his PDP counterpart, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar as the former has told a US court to hide his Chicago State University—CSU records because his reputation as president is at risk of further being damaged by Nigerian bloggers, court filings reveals.
Mr Tinubu has kicked against an application for order to direct discovery of his CSU credentials, claiming that releasing them will amount to arming Nigerian bloggers with information to discredit and weaken his reputation, the Peoples Gazette reports.
According to Mr Tinubu, previous records the school released in 2022 to Nigerian lawyer Mike Enahoro-Ebah have been turned into weapons by “bloggers to attack” his character.
If the purpose of the application is to uncover ‘opposition research’ or provide fodder fornews bloggers, then it is not proper,” asserted Mr Tinubu through his team of attorneys led by Oluwole Afolabi and Chicago-based Charles Carmichael on August 23 in response to the application filed by Atiku Abubakar, a major contender at the February 25 presidential election in Nigeria.
“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,” Mr Tinubu’s lawyers explained.
Mr Abubakar had asked the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to subpoena CSU into releasing Mr Tinubu’s records in order to clarify glaring inconsistencies in his gender, graduation date, age and so on but the president is fighting desperately 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.
(Newsband)
