The minister debunked the claim that the presidency and the entire administration were bothered about the controversy about the academic records of President Bola Tinubu from the Chicago State University (CSU).
Yusuf Tuggar, Nigerian Foreign affairs minister on Wednesday said Nigerians dwelling on the allegedly forged Chicago State University certificate President Bola Tinubu presented to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) were focusing on frivolous issues on which the government would “not be wasting their time.”
The minister debunked the claim that the presidency and the entire administration were bothered about the controversy about the academic records of President Bola Tinubu from the Chicago State University (CSU).
Tuggar made this known while speaking during an interview on the Channels TV, noting that there were more important issues to focus on than the controversy surrounding President Bola Tinubu's certificate.
He said; “The economic challenges we are facing – we shouldn’t be wasting time about whether some certificate, whether there is a ‘t’ missing or an ‘i’ hasn’t been dotted. That shouldn’t be our primary focus at the moment.
“There is a tendency to always try to distract and detain people on such frivolous issues as opposed to facing the major issues of development. We don’t have time to waste on that.
“Nobody is wasting time about certificate qualification for somebody who has been a governor of a state, served two terms, and has been on the national stage as a politician.
“You remember that (former) President Buhari had to go through the same thing, where people were actually questioning whether he went to secondary school or not. Someone who had classmates was the captain; he was a head boy.
“The foreign leaders with whom we’ve been engaging and the international organisations clearly are disinterested in wasting time on such.”
SaharaReporters had reported that the Chicago State University (CSU) has released at least 32 documents relating to the academic records of President Bola Tinubu and other students of the institution to Nigeria’s former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar’s lawyers as ordered by a United States court.
The academic records obtained by SaharaReporters on Tuesday include certificates of a number of other students as requested by Atiku so that the lawyers could fish out alleged discrepancies.
SaharaReporters earlier reported on Tuesday that the Chicago university released the documents to Atiku on Monday in compliance with the order of a US District Court in Northern District of Illinois.
President Tinubu had lost his emergency appeal to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago to stop Chicago State University from releasing his academic records to Atiku.
In her ruling on Tinubu’s emergency application in case No. 23 CV 05099, Judge Nancy L. Maldonado overruled “President Tinubu's objections to Magistrate Judge Gilbert's recommended ruling, and therefore adopts the ruling in full”.