All Progressives Congress has said that Peoples Democratic Party’s candidate in 2019 presidential election, Mr Atiku Abubakar, is not a citizen of Nigeria by birth and ought not to have been allowed in the first place to contest the election.

APC said this in response to the election petition filed before Presidential Election Petition Tribunal by Peoples Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Abubakar.

APC, third respondent to the petition, faulted the grounds of the petition, adding that Atiku “is not a citizen of Nigeria by birth and ought not to have even been allowed in the first place to contest the election.”

APC also faulted the claim by the petitioners that they obtained the authentic results of the February 23, 2019 election from Independent National Electoral Commission’s server showing that they won the election.

INEC had, on February 27, 2019, declared APC alongside its candidate, President Muhammadu Buhari, winner of the election with 15,191,847 votes to defeat his closest rival, Atiku, whom it said polled 11,262,978 votes.

But the petitioners stated in their 139-page petition anchored on five grounds that “from the data in the 1st respondent’s (INEC’s) server…the true, actual and correct results” from “state to state computation” showed that Atiku polled a total of 18,356,732 votes defeat Buhari whom they said scored 16,741,430 votes.

They said the results were the total votes scored by candidates in 35 states and Federal Capital Territory Abuja, as there was “no report on sever” about the results from Rivers State as of February 25, 2019.

By calculation, Atiku and PDP claimed to have defeated Buhari by 1,615,302 votes.

In its reply filed through its lead counsel, Mr. Lateef Fagbemi, APC said the data and computation of results on state-by-state basis were not legitimate.

The party stated that only results declared by INEC were authentic.

Punch