Rather settle the controversy, the release of General Muhammadu Buhari’s secondary school certificate has opened fresh questions.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has picked holes on the certificate which it insinuates is an act of master forgery.
The PDP described the certificate presented by Buhari, who is the Presidential of the All Progressives Congress presidential candidate as a super imposition of documents.
Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, the Director of the Directorate of Media and Publicity of the organsation, at a news conference in Abuja on Thursday, doubted the authencity of the certificate.
Fani-Kayode said the result, released on January 21, after controversies surrounding Buhari’s academic qualifications and his eligibility to contest the presidency onFebruary 14, was a fraud.
The News Agency of Nigeria recalls that hours after Buhari’s press conference in Kaduna, some documents appeared on various media platforms said to be the result released by his old school.
Fani-Kayode said that rather than providing a conclusive proof that Buhari possessed the minimum qualification to contest the presidency, he went into a session of “blame game”.
According to him, Buhari is shifting what ordinarily ought to be his personal responsibility to his alleged old school: the Provisional Secondary School, Katsina, now Government College, Katsina.
“It is unfortunate that the more General Buhari tries to extricate himself from the crisis, the more he stumbles into a new phase in the unfolding narrative of his obvious complicity,” he said.
Fani-Kayode said the development bordered on perjury, adding that it had again called Buhari’s avowed integrity to question.
He added that the directorate had carefully studied the purported statement of result, signed by the school’s principal and an examination officer, and observed that it was a clear super imposition.
“The result sheet which was attributed to the Cambridge examination body, is clearly a super imposition of one document on another,” he said.
He explained that the column which lined on the part where names were printed did not align with the blank columns, adding that there was an introduction of extraneous lines on some other columns.
He added that the documents contained an obvious alteration on the Mathematics column of the candidate, Mohamed Buhari, who was assumed to have scored an F in the subject.
This, he said, raised a fundamental issue of validity in view of the fact that the accompanying result sheet stated that any alteration or erasure rendered the statement of result invalid.
“Our conclusion from all these is that the documents purportedly released by Government College, Katsina, are forged,” he said.
Fani-Kayode said Buhari could not use the result “to bury the doubt about his eligibility for next month’s election as APC presidential candidate”.
Fani-Kayode added that the purported result was manipulated and fraudulently procured and therefore untenable in fact and in law.
He said: “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.”Muhammadu Buhari’s certificate
He called on the police and other security agencies to fish them out, arrest them, interrogate them and prosecute them in accordance with the laws should they fail to come forward voluntarily.
He stressed that the issue was not about the PDP or President Goodluck Jonathan, the party’s presidential candidate, but about the integrity of who becomes the next president of the country.
