Reactions have continued to trail the arrest of the Labour Party’s (LP) presidential candidate, Peter Obi, in London, United Kingdom, over alleged impersonation.
Obi was in the media spotlight, yesterday, for reasons other than the elections, after it was revealed that he was detained for impersonation. Apex Igbo socio-cultural body, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, has condemned last week’s reported attempt to arrest Obi, in London, slamming it as a move by political enemies.
Earlier, a famous Mass Communication scholar, and Deputy Vice Chancellor of Paul University, Awka, who is also a confidant of Obi, Prof. Chinyere Okunna, disclosed this yesterday on her Facebook page. Confirming the incident, Head of the Obi-Datti Media, Diran Onifade, disclosed how Obi was, last week, detained in London by UK immigration officials for alleged impersonation.
Though announcing that Obi had since returned to Nigeria, Onifade said: “The LP presidential candidate arrived at the Heathrow Airport in London, from Nigeria on Good Friday, April 7, and joined the queue for the necessary airport protocols when he was accosted by immigration officials, who handed him a detention note and told him to step aside.”
According to the statement, Obi was harassed and placed in detention where he spent the Easter holidays. “He was questioned for a long time, and it was very strange for a man, who lived for over a decade in that country.”
Onifade explained that the high implication of the offence is that the impersonator could be committing all kinds of weighty crimes, and other dubious acts, and it would be recorded in Obi’s name.
He emphasised that since the impersonator is still at large, the scenario is unimaginable as Obi could be implicated in a series of forbidden acts and even be framed in a manner that could be a huge embarrassment to him, his family, his party, the Obidient movement, and Nigeria.
Onifade insinuated a possible plot against Obi by the Federal Government, accusing it of bugging Obi’s phone while possibly looking for information to portray him badly before a section of the country.
“There have been several attacks on him from all corners since Obi went to court to challenge the result of the presidential election. Even the Federal Government, which directed him to go to court, dispatched the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammad, to the United States to attempt to de-market and accused him of treason.
“As if they were not getting the desired results of denting his image, they tried to persuade him to leave the country and go take a rest,” he said, adding that it is also not impossible that those urging him to leave the country may have planted the impersonators ostensibly to tarnish his image.
In the last two weeks, Obi has been in the eye of the storm, just as he has been doggedly pursuing his case at the election tribunal. On April 1, a conversation purportedly between him and the Founder of Living Faith Church Worldwide, Bishop David Oyedepo, had suggested how the LP presidential candidate, in last-minute push for votes, had begged Oyedepo to canvass for votes from Christians, tagging the election as a ‘religious war’.
On April 4, the Federal Government accused Obi and his running mate, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed of post-election threats that may put them at risk of treason charges. On Tuesday, a coalition of Northern elders called for the arrest of Obi and Datti for making inciting comments.
Reacting, Ohanaeze said any plot to embarrass and pull down Obi, because he had decided to legally pursue the mandate believed to have been given him by Nigerians, will continue to fail.
“The sole aim of faking Obi’s identity was to use his name to commit crime in London and other parts of the world so as to get him implicated in dubious and criminal activities and rope him into any number of offences to get him out of the political space,” Ohanaeze said through its National Publicity Secretary, Dr. Alex Chidozie Ogbonnia.
But for Omoyele Sowore, presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC), Obi’s detention by UK immigration is ‘fishy’. Questioning the authenticity of the incident, Sowore tweeted: “There is something suspicious about Obi’s UK immigration story, because I don’t see how a modern biometric passport with his fingerprints and biometric identity could lead to his being seen as an ‘impersonator’ or a clone. More curious is why he’s sending third parties to tell half of the story. Something fishy is going on!” (Guardian)
