The immediate past Chief of Air Staff and gubernatorial aspirant on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Bauchi State, Air Marshall Saddique Baba Abubakar (rtd), on Saturday denied a report in one of the national dailies linking him with a purported court action against the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in which his name was included as one of the plaintiffs.
Abubakar, who was until recently Nigeria’s Ambassador to the Niger Republic, denied being a plaintiff in the suit purportedly filed at the Abuja Division of the Federal High Court, describing the inclusion of his name in the suit as malicious and a deliberate effort to ridicule him and jeopardise his rising political popularity.
The former Ambassador, who distanced himself from the suit through the Director, Media and Publicity of the Baba Abubakar Campaign Council, Salisu Barau, stated that the report linking him with the purported suit was the figment of the imagination of rumour peddlers.
According to the Bauchi APC gubernatorial aspirant, the story is “baseless, unsubstantiated, untrue, malicious and the figment of the imagination of the rumour peddlers who are not comfortable with the rising political status of Ambassador Saddique Baba Abubakar”.
“We just woke up to read the publication by New Telegraph that Ambassador Saddique Baba Abubakar and two others have dragged INEC to a Federal High Court in Abuja seeking to stop it from disqualifying them. This is not true.
“Ambassador Saddique Baba Abubakar is a distinguish personality who served the country meritoriously as an Air Force Officer and ended his career with distinction. As an Ambassador, he served very well and voluntarily resigned in order to pursue his political career,” Barau stated.
He, however, urged Ambassador Abubakar’s teeming supporters to disregard the story, submitting that the former Air Force chief cannot and will not join such issues because his main focus is his gubernatorial aspiration.