President Bola Tinubu has informed the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal that his Guinean citizenship will expire in 2020, the same year that the opposition raised the issue of his Guinean passport.
Tinubu’s lead counsel, Wole Olanipekun (SAN), made this claim while requesting that the tribunal dismiss a petition filed by the Labour Party (LP) seeking Tinubu’s removal from office.
Olanipekun argued that the Guinean passport presented as evidence by the LP’s PW27 had expired in 2020, and that the opposition party’s claim of Tinubu’s dual citizenship was a deliberate attempt to embarrass the President.
Olanipekun said;
Lastly, the PW27 tendered Exhibit PBF4 (Guinean passport), which as usual, he claimed to have downloaded from the internet, purportedly representing the data pages of the respondent’s Guinean passport, which ex facie shows that the passport expired in 2020. It is all guesswork, aimed at embarrassing the respondent.
Tinubu’s claim comes in response to the LP and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) challenging his victory in the February 25 presidential election. The petitioners claim Tinubu is ineligible to be president because he holds dual citizenship in Nigeria and Guinea.
They accuse Tinubu of violating the law by failing to disclose relevant information about his constitutional qualifications in his Form EC9 submission to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
The petitioners claim Tinubu is constitutionally barred from running for president.
