The Presidential Election Petition Court on Tuesday evening
in Abuja admitted as exhibits the Chicago State University educational
documents of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who formally opened his defence in a
petition filed against his election by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and
its presidential candidate, Abubakar Atiku.
The educational documents tendered to establish his
attendance and graduation at the American University comprised, among others,
the admission letter offered to Tinubu by the famous institution.
Through his lead counsel, Chief Wole Olanipekun, President
Tinubu also tendered his US Visa documents, which indicated that he had
severally visited the United States of America (USA) unhindered between 2011
and 2021.
Tinubu, who tendered the documents to debunk the allegations
of criminality contained in the petition against him, also made available to
the court all documents of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) that cleared
him for the US trips.
Also admitted as exhibits by the court is the United States
of America’s embassy letter of April 4, 2003, which is a response to a letter
from the Nigerian Police dated February 3, 2003, which claimed that the embassy
had no criminal records of Tinubu in the USA.
The documents were admitted in spite of rigorous objections
against their respective admissibility by PDP and the former Vice President.
The petition’s first and third respondents, the Independent
National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the All Progressives Congress (APC),
made no objections to the admission of any of the documents.
In addition to the educational records, the court also
accepted the originating summons of a lawsuit filed at the Supreme Court by the
attorneys general of the states of Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta, Edo, and
Sokoto disputing Tinubu’s educational qualifications to run for president in
2023.
Also admitted were newspaper publications on several suits
filed against Tinubu by several groups.
The petition’s next hearing has been postponed until July 5
by Justice Haruna Simon Tsammani, the court’s presiding justice.
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