Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has bared his mind on the raging controversy over alleged dual citizenship status of President-elect, Bola Tinubu.
PlatinumPost reports that Tinubu’s alleged Guinean diplomatic passport surfaced on the social media on Saturday, sending some internet users into a frenzy, even as they accused him of lying to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) while under oath.
Speaking on the issue of the dual citizenship on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, Fashola said the matter should not be a source of concern.
“I know he carries Nigerian passport, I don’t know of dual citizenship, I know he resided in abroad when he went on exile, I don’t know if they gave him American citizen or not,” Fashola said.
He added : “What does that has to do with the results of the election,… I think the last time I checked the Nigerian constitution allows one to have dual citizenship. Doesn’t it?” Fashola queried.
Fashola, who served as Chief of Staff to Tinubu when the latter was Lagos governor, however, said he would find out if that can form a ground to deny anyone from occupying the office of President.
” I will check that, but I doubt the Nigerian constitution makes you disentitled if you have dual citizenship because the constitution allows you to have dual citizenship,” he said.
Speaking further, Fashola said disagreements during the just-concluded 2023 general elections should not fester beyond the politicking season.
He said, “I think that we are too joined at the hip to allow disagreements over elections fester beyond elections. There are too many places where we are connected.
“I tell people, for example, that if you are talking ethnic issues, my first cousin is Lois Ganiu Okafor and I have another cousin, Fola Okeke, God bless her soul. So, which one of them do I dislike?
“I think that some of the rhetoric went the wrong way and I think everybody should wear the trouser of adults in the room now and I think that is already taking place and tempers are coming down. Sometimes we can be extreme when there is competition. I think as it goes on, maturity will come in.”
The former governor of Lagos State and strong ally of Tinubu also said his party, the All Progressives Congress conducted pre-election internal polls but never released it, describing polls that predicted victory for Peter Obi of Labour Party and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party as “badly conducted”.
Speaking on Tinubu’s strategy against Obi and Atiku, the Senior Advocate of Nigeria, who headed the Election Planning Directorate of the Tinubu-Shettima campaign, said the party trained 2,000 agents from all the states and sent back to the states to train the agents in their respective states.
Some of the young people came from the United States to campaign for Tinubu, he said, adding that the party knew its results from the situation room before the final declaration by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).