The Peoples
Democratic Party Presidential Campaign Organisation alleged on Thursday that
the school certificate presented by the presidential candidate of the All
Progressives Congress, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), was forged.
The Director
of Media and Publicity of the organisation, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, made the
allegation at a press conference in Abuja.
He, however,
added that the organisation had yet to contact the school that issued the
certificate to either confirm or deny its authenticity.
But when the
school principal, Mr. Isyaku Bello was contacted on the telephone, he said the
certificate he signed was genuine.
The principal
said, “If they are doubting the result, then they should come and see the
authentic copy and not the photocopy sent to us by the Cambridge West Africa
School.
“We are here
waiting for anybody doubting what we have sent out. We are not running away.
Let them come and found out. “
Nevertheless,
Fani-Kayode still insisted that the document, which were released by the
Ministry of Education, Katsina State and the University of Cambridge, was
fraudulently procured.
He said those
who authored the result must be arrested by the police and be prosecuted.
He said, “Our
conclusion from all these is that the document purportedly released by the
Government College (Pilot) Katsina, upon which the APC presidential candidate
hopes to bury the doubt about his eligibility for next month’s election is
forged, manipulated and fraudulently procured. It is therefore untenable in
fact and in law.
“We do not
know who the authors and masterminds of this forgery are but whoever they are,
we urge them to come forward and be identified.
“If they fail
to come forward voluntarily, we hereby call on the police and other security
agencies to seek them out, find them, arrest them, interrogate them and
prosecute them, in accordance with the laws of the land.”
Fani-Kayode
also called on Buhari to submit himself to the police to answer charges of
perjury, alleging that the former Head of State lied on oath about his academic
qualification.
This, he
said, was what a man who “claims to represent integrity and due process ought
to do in this situation.”
He said there
was no way that Buhari could extricate himself from the crisis, adding that the
more he tried “to extricate himself, the more he stumbles into a new phase in
the unfolding narrative of his obvious complicity in a matter that he claimed
borders on perjury.”
He said
having carefully studied the statement of result as signed by the “school
principal” and an “examination officer” of the Government College, Katsina, as
well as the attached document titled, ‘University of Cambridge West Africa
School Certificate 1961’, his campaign organisation believed that the result
was not genuine.
He raised the
following observations and comments on the document.
The former
Minister of Information said, “The result sheet which was attributed to the
Cambridge examination body is clearly a super imposition of one document on
another, as you will shortly see in the enlarged image of the result sheet as
published. The column lines on the part where names are printed do not align
with the blank columns while there is an introduction of extraneous lines on
some other columns.
“The document
contains an obvious alteration on the Mathematics column of the candidate,
Mohamed Buhari, who was assumed to have scored an ‘F’ in the subject. This
raises a very fundamental issue of validity in view of the fact that the
accompanying result sheet states that ‘any alteration or erasure renders this
statement of result invalid.’
“This is the
standard practice in all interpretation of documents, especially academic
records. The question we put to Gen. Buhari and his party is whether this
alteration was done by the University of Cambridge.
Asked
if his organisation has made any request to verify the authenticity of the
documents, he said no.
Cullled: Punch
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