TheCable

The All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential campaign council says there was no meeting between Bola Tinubu, president-elect, and Olukayode Ariwoola, chief justice of Nigeria (CJN).

The campaign council was reacting to reports that Tinubu met with the CJN in the UK.

In a statement on Thursday, Bayo Onanuga, media director of the campaign council, said there is an attempt to create doubt about the legitimacy of the election that produced Tinubu as president-elect.

Onanuga said the president-elect is currently in Paris, France, and not in the UK.

“The story was a pure concoction from the hallucinating minds of hatchet men bent on creating doubts and public distrust about the legitimacy of our recent election, which was won by Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu,” the media director said.

“We refute emphatically that there has been no clandestine meeting between the president-elect and the respected chief justice of our country, anywhere. It’s pure fabricated news, groundless in fact and authenticity.

“To show that the story was a mere salacious fiction, meant to draw traffic to the discredited purveyor, it claimed the Chief Justice left Nigeria for London on 11 March, on a wheelchair to board a plane.

“The president-elect left Nigeria on 21 March, 10 clear days thereafter. What kind of appointment or secret meeting will the two men have arranged in London, with such widely disparate arrival dates, except in the imagination of the false news merchants?

“We can confirm that the president-elect, who left Nigeria Tuesday, has not been in London. He is right now in France to have a deserved rest, after a hectic campaign that began in January 2022.

“He will go to London thereafter before proceeding to Mecca for the lesser Hajj.”

Festus Akande, spokesperson of the supreme court, is yet to respond to an enquiry sent to him by TheCable on the matter.