President Bola Tinubu has petitioned the Supreme Court to deny Atiku Abubakar’s request to provide new evidence in his appeal of the decision of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.
President Tinubu’s academic papers, according to Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) presidential candidate for the general elections of 2023, are riddled with inaccuracies and forgeries.
His plea that the Chicago State University release Tinubu’s academic records be ordered by the US court for the northern district of Illinois was granted.
At the top court, the former vice president is currently attempting to introduce these records.
However, President Tinubu stated in a response to the primary appeal that the claim of certificate forgery was not made in Abubakar’s petition to the tribunal.
He claimed that the petitioners’ attempts to raise new concerns (such as certificate forgery) that were not covered by the main petition in some lines of their reply to the tribunal were incorrect.
Atiku’s motion, which was approved by a US court, is unrelated to the Supreme Court’s ongoing review of an earlier appeal and does not derive from the evidence or the tribunal’s decision, according to President Tinubu.
The president further said that the appeal should be rejected as a whole because it has no basis.
A petition contesting the results of the February 25, 2023, presidential election was submitted by Atiku and the PDP.
However, the Presidential Election case Tribunal determined in its ruling on September 6 that Atiku had not proven all of the claims in his case.
On September 18, 2023, the PDP candidate subsequently appealed to the supreme court.
The Supreme Court has not set a date for hearing the appeal.
