The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, has stated that the administration of President Bola Tinubu does not have time to waste on “trivial matters.”
His comment comes on the heels of the recent controversy surrounding Tinubu’s academic records at Chicago State University (CSU).
Speaking on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Wednesday, Tuggar stated that the controversy does not cast a shadow on some of the recent international engagements that the president has had.
“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,” he said.
He opined that a former president, Muhammadu Buhari, experienced a similar controversy over his academic qualifications.
“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 questioning whether he went to secondary school or not? Someone who had classmates was the captain; he was a head boy,” he said.
Tuggar asserted that none of the international meetings the president has attended and interacted with have shown interest in the saga.
“The foreign leaders with whom we’ve been engaging and the international organizations clearly are disinterested in wasting time on such.
“We pay no mind to that,” Tuggar stated.
He further stated that, as a result of the critical situation the nation is in right now, Nigerians should not be perturbed by the certification and instead should concentrate on development, adding that the nation’s population is growing at a rate of 3% annually.
”The economic challenges we are facing -we shouldn’t be wasting time about whether some certificate is missing or whether an I hasn’t been dotted. That shouldn’t be our primary focus at the moment,” he said.
Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had approached the US District Court in Northern Illinois to compel the Chicago State University (CSU) to release Tinubu’s academic records, arguing that it would boost his suit challenging the president’s election in the February 25 presidential poll.
The PDP stalwart had requested the documents for use in Nigerian courts to support his argument that Tinubu forged a certificate he claimed to have obtained from CSU in 1979 and submitted to Nigeria’s electoral body, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), for the 2023 presidential election.
On October 1, a US Court ordered the CSU to deliver President Bola Tinubu’s academic records to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar by Tuesday.
On Monday, the university provided Atiku’s legal team with a cache of documents related to Tinubu’s study at the institution, as well as copies of certificates with redacted names granted to other people around the time the Nigerian president graduated from the school in 1979.
It also included Tinubu’s enrollment records and a letter dated June 27, 2022, certifying that he studied accounting at the university from August 1977 to June 1979. According to the letter, Tinubu received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with Honours on June 22, 1979.
