Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) 2023 presidential candidate, has stated that filing an affidavit in court on Saturday did not violate any Nigerian law.
At a press conference in Abuja on Sunday, October 22, media aides to the former Vice President showed slides indicating that some court paperwork had previously been signed on Saturday.
In response to a question about the signing of an affidavit in which the PDP flag-bearer changed his name from Sadiq Abubakar to Atiku Abubakar on August 18, 1973, one of the media advisers, Paul Ibe, stated that no law was committed.
Ibe added that research by the PDP candidate’s legal team revealed that it was not only his principal who signed an affidavit in court on a Saturday, but that documents were also signed on weekends.
He said: “We conducted research into the registry of the Lagos State High Courts in the same year, 1973, to see if it was really an absurdity to have court papers signed on a Saturday.
“The outcome of our findings showed clearly that there are court papers that were signed on Saturdays in the year 1973! Atiku Abubakar’s affidavit was not the only one signed on Saturday, as the corn-men would want you to believe.
“We hope that this discovery into Atiku’s Saturday affidavit by his own media team will rest this issue and provide the opportunity for Bola A. Tinubu’s team to come clean with its decades of forgeries and lies.
“Nigerians are waiting for them to put an end to this kindergarten Tom and Jerry that has done nothing but bring embarrassment and humiliation to our country and its people.
“Nigeria is a country of laws, and no one single man or woman, no matter how highly placed, is bigger than our laws”.
Ibe described the issue surrounding Atiku’s Saturday affidavit as “shadow boxing,” insisting that the paper was authentic and not a forgery, as some members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) had assumed.
Ibe added: “It was obvious from the start of their journey into futility that what the media aides and supporters of Bola A. Tinubu were doing was a random bite of the public profile of Atiku Abubakar until they found an item they could chomp with their filthy teeth.
“It was amusing watching them running kiti-kata like a person wey drink water no wan drop cup – as we say in Naija parlance of a restless soul on a fruitless journey.
“So, eventually, they found that the affidavit that Atiku Abubakar deposed to on August 18, 1973, wherein he expressed his wishes to be publicly known as Atiku Abubakar, was signed on a Saturday.”
Atiku is appealing President Bola Tinubu’s victory in the Supreme Court after losing the first leg of the legal battle at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT).
