Labour Party presidential candidate, Mr Peter Obi, has described as fake, a photo of him and Finland-based pro-Biafra agitator, Mr. Simon Ekpa.
Expa is the mastermind of several sit-at-home orders in the South-East region, which had allegedly resulted in loss of many lives and property.
Head of the Obi-Datti Media Office, Mr. Diran Onifade, in a statement, said perpetrators of the fake photo inserted Obi’s popular supporter and rights activist, Aisha Yesufu, to further claim credibility.
He said they all grew up being educated that photos tell a thousand stories and do not tell lies as photos were usually self-evident.
Onifade said the standard narrative had changed remarkably with dubious minds always ready to deploy its creatively albeit negatively, to create what was non-existent.
He said: “The scenario is exactly what played out in the photoshopped picture of Peter Obi supposedly standing with the Finland-based irritant Biafra agitator, Simon Ekpa.
“This is all in a desperate move to drag Obi’s name into disrepute by linking him with the ugly story that Ekpa has become in Nigeria.
“For clarity, the picture was taken by Obi standing with an admirer on a Virgin Flight on Friday, July 21, 2023.
“In trying to authenticate their filthy and disgustingly dirty act, they inserted the picture of Aisha Yusuf behind them.
“The memory may be short to forget that Obi was the first to describe the sit-at-home thing as an act being engineered and bred by a criminal that the system has refused to squarely tackle.”
Onifade said the menace of this crime was becoming manifest even to attract the views of the nation’s parliament, and may be necessary to critically study the handling of this crime.
In a related development, he said some people had put out a loss leader advert, purporting Peter Obi as “providing 20GB Free Data and N5000 Airtime in celebration of his 62nd Birthday. This is a SCAM! Subscriber beware!!.”
Onifade said it was mind-boggling that these criminal ploys were passed off as playing politics.
He said instead of seeking the line of a final solution to the cankerworm that had embarrassingly held the region and the country down, some mischief makers who were obsessed with Peter Obi’s rising fame were concerned with linking him to Ekpa.
According to him, yet another failed attempt to dent the political Eagle whose concern is how to create a new Nigeria and reduce the poverty in the land.
He said the reasonable thing to do if this country was sincere in tackling its economic challenges was to study the views expressed by this phenomenal political leader of contemporary Nigeria instead of trolling him endlessly.
The Obi-Datti media office also attacked social media activist, Reno Omokri, over what it termed his growing obsession Mr. Obi, saying it wa the result of pathological neurosis.
Onifade said in a statement that Omokri’s antics in an effort to please his paymasters and increase his social media importance by equating himself and his behavior with Obi’s rising prominence have got absurd.
He described Omokir’s latest ruse of linking Obi to the travails of the embattled and suspended Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) Governor Godwin Emefiele as laughable.
“Ironically, Omokiri did not say how, where, and when Obi supposedly contributed to the alleged institutional problems confronting the CBN. Maybe Omokri will suggest to security that Obi supplied him with the gun they are charging him for.
“He also did not clarify how Obi contributed to “the rotten CBN” as alluded to by Bola Tinubu and whether Obi was among the beneficiaries of the alleged foreign exchange sharing at the apex bank under Emefiele. He did not even say how Obi would have helped Emefiele in the embarrassing inter-agency fracas on Tuesday in Lagos.
“Omokiri cannot sleep over any negative activity and lawlessness happening in Nigeria until he has concocted Peter Obi to it, always conscious of the dubious mileage he elicits from provoking Obi’s large audience, especially the Obidients while satisfying his paymaster’s proclivities.
“If he is not linking Obi to herdsmen, IPOB, unknown gunmen, and bomb blasts, he is connecting and associating him with all manners of criminality, real and imagined.
“Controlled by his jaundiced mind Omokri would not remember that the Labour Party led by Obi was the first to react when Emefiele was arrested when the party called for the need to follow the rule of law in dealing with the former CBN Governor.
“Perhaps soon, Omokri’s fictional and creative imagination will also compel him to link the arrest and the detention of the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Abdulrasheed Bawa to the former Anambra state Governor. Very soon, we will hear Omokiri linking Obi to oil bunkering, merely because he spoke up on oil theft.
“Obi-Datti Media office understands Omokri’s insensate ambition to be relevant and the resultant predicament of his joblessness, but wishes to advise him to look for something meaningful to do other than continuously indulging in cheap blackmail. Obi’s steady principled character is obvious that he does not indulge in name calling as all his utterances are issue-driven,” he said.
“We appreciate that discerning minds are not oblivious to Omokri’s dubious motives, but we continue to alert the gullible public to consign his utterances and tweets to the trash where such balderdash rightly belongs.”
Credit: Daily Sun