by James Sambo

The Peoples Democratic Party Presidential Campaign Organisation (PDPPCO) has alleged that the school certificate of the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), is not authentic.

Femi Fani-Kayode, the Director of Media and Publicity of the organisation, made the allegation at a press conference in Abuja, on Thursday, January 22, insisting that the document, which were released by the Ministry of Education, Katsina State and the University of Cambridge, was fraudulent and adulterated.

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 called on Buhari to answer to charges of perjury, alleging that the former Head of State lied on oath about his academic qualification.

According to the former Minister of Aviation, having carefully studied the statement of result which was 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’, the presidential campaign organisation believed that the result was far from genuine.

Fani-Kayode 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.”

Meanwhile, Punch Newspaper spoke with the school Principal, Isyaku Bello, who revealed that the certificate was indeed genuine.

Bello 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.”