By Agency Report
Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had said President-elect Bola Tinubu has dual citizenship of Nigeria and Guinea.
Atiku, in a fresh court filing submitted to the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) sitting in Abuja, also accused Mr Tinubu of not disclosing facts of his constitutional qualifications in his Form EC9 submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), contrary to the provisions of the law.
In the response filed by his lead counsel, Chris Uche, SAN, Atiku said that his identity, comprising age, state of origin and educational qualifications had never been in dispute.
He insisted that Mr Tinubu was constitutionally disabled from contesting for the office of president.
The PDP presidential candidate, amongst other things, alleged that Tinubu was unfit to lead Nigeria having been indicted for drug related offences in the United States and made to forfeit a sum of 460,000 dollars as a compromise agreement.
According to him, Mr Tinubu holds dual citizenship of Nigeria and Guinea, having voluntarily acquired the citizenship of the Republic of Guinea.
Reacting to Mr Tinubu’s response in which he described Atiku as a serial election loser, the former Vice President said that Tinubu was a giant in forfeiture, drug related offences and failure to disclose dual nationality to INEC.
“The comparison of the second respondent (Tinubu) with the first petitioner ( Atiku) who had attained the eminent position of Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for eight years is totally unfounded,” he said.
Atiku said that he was challenging the declaration of Tinubu as president-elect on the grounds that Tinubu and APC did not win majority of the lawful votes cast in the Feb. 25 presidential election.
He said that Mr Tinubu failed part of the constitutional requirements having failed to secure 25 per cent of the votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, as constitutionally required.
He argued that the return of Mr Tinubu as the winner of the 2023 presidential election was undue, unlawful and invalid because Tinubu did not meet the constitutional requirements.
Atiku said that Tinubu deliberately chose not to answer points of substance in the petition and opted for extraneous facts, contradictory, evasive, speculative and vague assertions.
A former President of Guinea, Alpha Condé, reportedly confirmed conferring what he described as “Ambassador extraordinaire” on Mr Tinubu.
He said the honour was in compensation for the roles Mr Tinubu played during his election in 2015. It is not clear if the status is equated to citizenship of the country.
Mr Condé, who is currently in exile in Turkey following a 2021 coup that ousted him, made the comments after a snapshot bio-data page of a Guinean passport show Mr Tinubu’s photo and details trended online.
About the same time, another viral video clip, also showed Mr Tinubu the governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu and the Guinean ambassador to the African Union (AU) for Agenda 2063, Ousmane Yara, in a Guinea-government-owned helicopter.
Mr Yara explained to Sun Newspaper the helicopter video was taken when Mr Tinubu was a guest of the ousted president of Guinea during thr country’s independence anniversary celebration in 2016.
(NAN)
