Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), in the 2023 polls has stated that he did not break any law by signing an affidavit in court on Saturday.
Addressing a press conference in Abuja on Sunday, October 22, media aides to the former Vice President presented slides indicating that some court documents were in the past signed on Saturday.
Responding to a question concerning the signing of an affidavit wherein the PDP flagbearer changed his name from Sadiq Abubakar to Atiku Abubakar on Saturday, August 18, 1973, one of the media advisers, Paul Ibe said no law was broken.
Ibe stated that findings by the legal team of the PDP candidate showed that it wasn’t only his principal who signed an affidavit in court on a Saturday, adding that documents were 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 conmen 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”.
Describing the controversy over Atiku’s Saturday affidavit as mere shadow boxing, Ibe insisted that the document was genuine and not fake, as been speculated by some members of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
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 challenging the victory of President Bola Tinubu at the Supreme Court, having lost the first leg of the legal battle at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT).
