The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar has said that the present administration is not distracted by the circumstances surrounding President Bola Tinubu’s claim of having attended and obtained a certificate from Chicago State University (CSU) in the United States of America.
He referred to the certificate issue as a “trivial matter” and a diversion, adding that the Tinubu administration did not have time to expend on it.
Tuggar, speaking in a TV interview on Wednesday, claimed that despite the uproar, the President had met with other world leaders and that the subject had not come up during any of his most recent international engagements.
“The foreign leaders that we’ve 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 Nigeria 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.
He urged Nigerians to rather concentrate on issues bothering around development of the country.
“Considering the economic challenges we are facing, we shouldn’t be wasting time about whether some certificate, 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.
Chioma Kalu
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