By Stephen Ubanna
For daring to challenge President Muhammadu Buhari of the ruling All Progressive Congress, APC, in the Election Petition Tribunal, the party appears to have added another dimension into the matter to force the Nigerian Immigration Service, NIS, officials, to go after the former Vice president and People’s democratic , PDP, Candidate, on the allegation that he was a Camerounian and therefore not qualified to have contested the Saturday, February 23,2019 Presidential election.
The Katsina born Nigerian President and the APC, leadership, may have been forced to come up with the allegation that the PDP Candidate is a Cameroonian to complicate the matter in the Tribunal because of his petition before the three man Tribunal stating that he was the” lawful winner of the February 23, 2019 election” .
He had told that he won the Presidential election with about 1.6 million votes to defeat, Buhari, the APC, Candidate , who was declared winner by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, and thus, issued a Certificate of Return to him. The Commission had declared that the APC Candidate won the election with 15,191,847 votes to defeat the former Vice President who polled 11,262,978 votes
Convinced that he won the election, the PDP Candidate was said to have has urged the Tribunal to nullify the 2019 poll and ordered for a fresh election that will be conducted in lines with the provisions of the country’s electoral laws. The initial claim by the APC Presidential Candidate and the party leadership to the security agencies including the Department of State Security, DSS, was that Atiku hacked the result from INEC server to prepare the ground to force the Commission to drag him to Court for entering their server secretly.
Political watchers, however, believe
Lateef Fagbemi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, and the party Lawyer , was said to have also petitioned the Tribunal insisting that as Cameroonian , Atiku ought not to have ” taken part in the February 23, 2019, election in the first instance”.
Going by the brief given to the legal luminary by the APC leadership, the party claimed that the PDP Presidential Candidate was born on November 25, 1946 ,in Jada, Adamawa, in Northern Cameroon and therefore not a Nigerian by birth. It is not surprising why the party had consistently maintained in the recent time that Atiku had” no right to be voted for in the election to the office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in the last Presidential election.
There are fears that the Abdulrahman Shugaba Darman, who was an elected a member of the Borno state House of Assembly in 1979 on the platform of the late Wakiri Ibrahim Great Nigeria’s People’s Party, GNPP may play out itself again.. Darman who rose to become the Majority leader of the House bwas deported o a village in Chad in the allegedly politically motivated action of then ruling National Party of Nigeria, NPN.
Describing the allegation as laughable, Atiku said ”the position of the APC was so pedestrian and shows such a straw clutching desperation ” that should be ignored. Recall that between the 1980s and now, Atiku had been very visible in Nigeria Business and political circles but it did not occur to Buhari as a former Head of State that he was not a Nigeria until he retired as a Director of the Nigerian Customs Service to ventured into the murky waters of Nigerian politics.
He had contested the December 1998, Adamawa state governorship election on the platform of the PDP and won. He was

Note that he
A source told the Value News that Abdulrahman Dambazau,
Many see the APC action as part of the political plot to silence Atiku, to drop his case against Buhari, the APC, Candidate at the last Presidential election at the Tribunal. Already the PDP Presidential Candidate was said to have assembled a team of over twenty SANs who are waiting in the wings for the APC in Court.
A Lawyer averred that if APC, thinks, these would be another Shugaba Darman case to celebrate , they have made the worst mistake as Atiku would floor the government in Court, with all the documentary evidence to prove that he is a Nigerian by birth day and had lived all his life in the country.