Supreme Court won’t accept any document Atiku gets from US”- Tinubu’s lawyers

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s lawyers have reacted to the recent judgement by a district court in the United States, US, ordering the Chicago State University, CSU, to provide the president’s academic records as was requested by Atiku Abubakar.

The President’s lawyers are insisting that the documents would not be relevant in Atiku’s appeal against Tinubu at the Supreme Court.

According to them, the Electoral Act does not allow inclusion of evidence that was not stated in the petition.

“A party must provide a list of the documents he intends to rely on at the time his petition is filed. A party cannot spring a surprise on his adversary by introducing evidence that was not filed along with the petition,” one of Tinubu’s lawyer, Afolabi said while playing down the importance of his academic documents and stating that it will be of no use in Atiku’s Supreme Court appeal in Nigeria.

Similarly, the Coordinator of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team, Babatunde Ogala (SAN), said, “The documents can no longer be used. It is of no value. We have passed that stage.”

“One is whether President Tinubu attended Chicago State University. The answer is yes. Second, what were his grades in school? The school had already provided that,” Ogala said.

Recall that Nigeria’s former vice president and presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, in the 2023 election, Atiku Abubakar had earlier secured an order from a US magistrate for CSU to make Tinubu’s academic records available to his legal team.

The magistrate, Jeffrey Gilbert, reportedly ordered CSU to provide all relevant and non-privileged documents to Atiku’s legal team within two days.

The documents sought by the PDP candidate, through his counsel, Angela Liu, include Tinubu’s record of admission and acceptance at the Chicago State University, dates of attendance as well as the degrees, awards, and honours obtained by Tinubu from the CSU.

However, few days away from the deadline given by the magistrate, Tinubu’s lawyers approached the US high court, arguing that the earlier decision by the magistrate needed to be reviewed by a district judge.

The request for a review and delay of the magistrate’s order till Monday was eventually granted by the US district judge as Tinubu’s application which was filed by his New York-based lawyer, Oluwole Afolabi, advanced two reasons.

Afolabi argued that Tinubu’s academic records are not useful in Nigerian courts as claimed by Atiku because “the Nigerian election proceedings and the Nigerian courts have explicitly been unreceptive to the discovery.”

His second reason is that Atiku’s request “is unduly intrusive because it allows the applicant (Atiku) to conduct a fishing expedition into the intervenor’s private, confidential, and protected educational records.”

Meanwhile, the former vice president in a fresh response filed last Wednesday, in Chicago, Illinois, charged the court to overrule Tinubu’s request in its entirety.

In a fresh judgment, Judge Nancy Maldonado of the Northern disctrict Court of Illinois noted that CSU did not object to Judge Jeffery Gilbert’s decision that the academic record be made public.

The court held that Atiku’s interest outweighs any intrusion on Tinubu’s privacy interests in his educational records and therefore, overruled Tinubu’s objections to the ruling by the magistrate ordering CSU to make his academic records available to Atiku.

Reacting to the verdict, a member of the PDP National Executive Council, National Deputy Youth Leader, Timothy Osadolor, described President Tinubu’s appeal as a needless route.

Osadolor, in a recent interview said “If he was convinced that has had nothing to hide, there was no need for those appeals against the courts.”

According to him, the US judgment will reinforce Atiku’s appeal before the Supreme Court.

“Tinubu is not who he claims to be and that is what our candidate and our party want to prove.”

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