BY TIMOTHY AGBOR
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, has said that President Bola Tinubu was not distracted by the recent controversies surrounding his certificate.
Tuggar said this while speaking on a television programme on Wednesday.
He added that the Tinubu administration does not have time to waste on the certificate issue, which he described as a “trivial matter”.
According to him, the President had met with other world leaders despite the controversy and the issue had not been a subject of discussion in all his recent international engagements.
“The foreign leaders that we have been engaging and the international organisations clearly are disinterested in wasting time on such.
“We pay no mind to that,” Tuggar said.
He added that it was not surprising that the issue had been a subject of discussion in the Nigerian space, adding that former President Muhammadu Buhari faced a similar thing.
“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.
“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 actually questioning whether he went to secondary school or not. Someone who had classmates was the captain; and was a head boy,” he said.
According to him, Nigerians should concentrate on development.
“Considering the economic challenges we are facing – we shouldn’t be wasting time about whether some certificates, whether there is a ‘T’ missing or an ‘I’ hasn’t been dotted. That shouldn’t be our primary focus at the moment,” he said.
In another development, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Temitope Ajayi, has debunked claims that the certificate presented to the Independent National Electoral Commission l by President Tinubu to be able to contest the 2023 presidency was forged.
Ajayi, who issued a statement regarding the controversy on Wednesday, said there was nowhere in the deposition made by the Chicago State University that the institution admitted that the certificate presented to INEC by President Tinubu was fake.
Taking to his account on the X (formerly known as Twitter), the presidential media aide wrote: “We should be clear.
“In the deposition made by the Chicago State University, there was nowhere the University said the certificate presented to INEC by President Tinubu is fake.
“The University insisted under oath that President Tinubu graduated with honours and even at that, replacements for lost certificates are done by vendors not the University.
“The claim that President Tinubu submitted a fake certificate to INEC does not make sense. A man cannot forge the academic records he possesses. You can only forge what you don’t have.”
