A US-based Nigerian academic, Dr. Farooq Kperogi says those attacking National Leader of All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu on account of his university education record may be doing the man a disservice.
Kperogi, who is a fierce critic of the ruling APC, stated this in a column published by Saturday Tribune/Peoples Gazette.
He said while he resents Tinubu’s politics and is against his presidential ambition, he found no merit in claims that the man did not attend university.
“I resent Bola Tinubu’s politics and don’t want him to be president if I can help it. In a January 12 Facebook update, I wrote, “I’d hate for him to be president because he is too sick, too old, too steeped in fraud (even his name, age, education, and origins are frauds), and too much like Buhari whose ‘legacy’ of poverty and ineptitude he said he’ll ‘continue with’ to be an option.”
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“But I must admit that he is the victim of sustained, at times innocent and at other times intentional, mis- and disinformation regarding his age and postsecondary education. When I encounter superior facts that challenge or confute what I know, I yield and admit my error without hesitation,” Kperogi wrote.
He recalled two instances when he changed his stance on former Goodluck Jonathan’s PhD and President Muhammadu Buhari’s West African Senior Certificate (WASC) in the face of superior evidence.
“Well, the Punch of January 7 reported that Chicago State University wrote to it to confirm that Tinubu did indeed graduate from the school after two years of study there. The Richard J. Daley College, a community college in Chicago, also confirmed that he did receive an associate degree (equivalent to an ordinary national diploma in Nigeria) from there. In other words, he spent two years at Richard Daley College for an associate degree and another two years at Chicago State University for a bachelor’s degree.
“He got in trouble in 1999 because he wrote on his INEC forms that he’d graduated from the University of Chicago, a prestigious private university, when he actually graduated from Chicago State University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). He later blamed the “error” on Senator Tokunbo Afikuyomi.
“So, the widespread claim that the genuineness of Tinubu’s university education is shrouded in mystery has no basis in fact.
What has some basis in fact, though, is that there is no public record for where he attended secondary school. In his 1999 INEC form that he admitted was error-ridden, he said he attended Government College, Ibadan, which turned out to be false.
“In a January 22 article, Tinubu’s former press secretary by the name of Segun Ayobolu said in the aftermath of the controversy that attended the exposé of the inaccuracies in his educational credentials in his INEC form, Tinubu admitted to not having attended a secondary school after his primary school education “because of his poverty”,” Kperogi further wrote,