TD In October 2023, in a courtroom in Illinois, under an order signed by Judge Nancy Maldonado, the Registrar of Chicago State University, Caleb Westberg, sat down and swore an oath.
What he said under that oath should have ended a presidency.
He testified that Chicago State University did not issue the diploma dated 1979 that Bola Ahmed Tinubu submitted to Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission in June 2022.
He testified that the university, after a diligent search of every diploma in its possession, could not find any diploma issued by CSU to Tinubu in 1979.
He testified that the university had never seen the document Tinubu presented to INEC until the scandal forced it into the light.
He confirmed that Tinubu never applied for a replacement certificate and never received one.
And the document itself confesses its own fraud.
It bears the signature of Elnora Daniel, who did not arrive at Chicago State University until 1998, nineteen years after the certificate was supposedly signed.
It references a board of trustees that the Registrar admitted did not exist in 1979.
The signatures, the logo, the seal, all of them differ from genuine 1979 diplomas the university produced for comparison.
Then there is the paper trail behind the paper trail.
The Southwest College transcript used to gain admission to CSU identifies the applicant as female.
The CSU records list a birth year of 1954, while the president tells Nigeria he was born in 1952.
The admission file claims a 1970 graduation from Government College, Lagos, a school that was not founded until 1974.
A GCE result with an E in Chemistry, an E in Biology, and an F in Physics. Was the applicant male or female? Born in 1952 or 1954? A graduate of a school that did not yet exist?
These are not trick questions. They are questions a president should be able to answer, and he has answered none of them.
Why does this matter? It matters because the presidency of Nigeria is not a market stall where any document will do.
It matters because a man who would present to the electoral commission a certificate the issuing university disowns under oath in an American federal proceeding is telling us exactly who he is.
It matters because every civil servant, every student, every young Nigerian sitting WAEC and JAMB is held to a standard of honesty that the occupant of Aso Rock has treated with contempt.
The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi raised these questions more than two decades ago.
He was vindicated by an American court, an American deposition, and an American discovery process, because Nigerian institutions would not do their duty.
That, too, is part of the scandal.
We the Nigerian people keep learning more about this man, and what we learn is not merely embarrassing. It is disqualifying.
A nation cannot demand integrity from its citizens while excusing fraud at its summit.
The questions stand. The oath-sworn testimony stands. And history is taking notes.
Kio Amachree is Founder and President of Worldview International, Stockholm.
