The President-elect, Bola Tinubu distanced himself from a report that he met with Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Olukayode Ariwoola in London.
According to reports, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) met with Ariwoola to seek the support of the judiciary as his opponents seek to overturn his victory in the February 25th, 2023 election.
Tinubu is currently in France, according to Bayo Onanuga, the APC presidential campaign council’s (PCC) Director of Media and Publicity.
The statement reads;
Our attention has been drawn to the grossly fake, misleading and malicious story about the Chief Justice of Nigeria Olukayode Ariwoola disguising to meet President-elect Bola Tinubu in London.
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.
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 so wide 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.
As we move towards inauguration on 29 May 2023, Nigerians should expect more false and salacious news from a section of the Nigerian media, on the payroll of the opposition.