In a recent development, President Bola Tinubu of Nigeria has reportedly filed a plea with a United States court to shield his records from Chicago State University (CSU) from the prying eyes of Nigerian bloggers.
According to a report by Peoples Gazette, the Nigerian leader is apprehensive that these records could be exploited by reporters to tarnish his reputation.
The Nigerian President fiercely opposed an application for an order to direct discovery of his CSU credentials, noting that previous records the school released in 2022 to Nigerian lawyer Mike Enahoro-Ebah were used as weapons by ‘bloggers to attack’ his character.
“If the purpose of the application is to uncover ‘opposition research’ or provide fodder for news bloggers, then it is not proper,” Tinubu said through his team of attorneys led by Oluwole Afolabi and Chicago-based Charles Carmichael on August 23.
The statement credited to Tinubu through his lawyers was in response to the application filed by Atiku Abubakar, a candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 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,” Tinubu’s lawyers explained in the seen document.
This news platform reported earlier that Atiku had asked the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to subpoena CSU into releasing Tinubu’s records 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 Ebah with records that showed a certain Bola Tinubu, born March 29, 1954, who attended the school at the same period as 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.
Atiku believed the requested records would show which early and high school papers Tinubu submitted to CSU before he was admitted to study there.
CSU’s response was first published on independent journalist David Hundeyin’s website in 2022 where bloggers picked it up and circulated it to almost every Nigerian.
The gender controversy dominated social platforms like Twitter, where the majority questioned the eligibility of the former governor of Lagos State to run for the presidency and raised concerns about the allegation of perjury
“Those proceedings centre around a self-proclaimed Nigerian ‘public interest litigator’ who utilised a Chicago law firm to unilaterally (without court approval) issue a subpoena to Chicago State University “to test the truth and veracity of Mr Tinubu’s assertions . . . that he attended various educational institutions located in the Chicagoland Area,” said the president’s lawyers.
“Chicago State University then purportedly provided documents in response. Those documents have apparently been utilised by the public interest litigator and bloggers to attack President Tinubu’s character,” the lawyers pointed out, fearing the same fate awaits the release of the Nigerian leader’s records to Atiku.
