PDP accuses APC candidate of forging WAEC certificate

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has rejected the recently released West African Examination Council (WAEC) result of All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari saying that it was forged.

Buhari’s secondary school made the results available on January 21, after the former Head of State addressed the controversy surrounding his certificates.

The PDP, speaking via a statement released by the Director of Media and Publicity of the Goodluck Jonathan Campaign Organization, Femi Fani-Kayode said that the document was “forged, manipulated and fraudulently procured”.

The statement reads:

Gentlemen of the Press,

Yesterday, 21st of January, 2014, the Presidential candidate of the All Progressive Congress, Gen Muhammadu Buhari addressed a Press Conference where he attempted to explain the series of controversies surrounding his academic qualifications especially the Secondary School Certificate.

Again, the APC candidate, rather than provide a conclusive proof that he possesses this minimum qualification, went into a session of blame game and shifting of what ordinarily ought to be his personal responsibility as he said and I quote “I have formally requested my old school, Provisional Secondary School Katsina, which is now known as Government College, Katsina, to make available the Schools copy of the result of the Cambridge West African Schools Certificate.”

It is unfortunate that the more Gen Buhari tries to extricate himself from the crisis, the more he stumbles into a new phase in the unfolding narrative of his obvious complicity in a matter that borders on perjury and which has called his avowed integrity to question.

It is quite unfortunate that a few hours after Gen Buhari’s Press conference, some documents appeared on various Media platforms purporting to be the APC candidate’s results released by his old school.

Having carefully studied the statement of Result 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, we wish to make the following observations and comments:

The results 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 Results 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.

One of the footnotes on the document purportedly issued by the University of Cambridge says “the results of this candidate in all subjects except English Language have been carried forward from the 1960 examination.” The question arising from this is: When exactly did Buhari sit for all the other subjects claimed to have been passed in the Secondary School Examination?

Our conclusion from all these is that the documents purportedly released by Government College (Pilot) Katsina, upon which the APC Presidential candidates hopes to bury the doubt about his eligibility for next month’s election are forged, manipulated and fraudulently procured. They are 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.

We reiterate our call on Gen Buhari to submit himself to the police to answer charges of perjury, having lied on oath about his academic qualifications. This is what a man who claims to represent integrity and due process ought to do in this situation.