The purported burning of Ikenga Imo Ugochinyere’s homes and vehicles has been disputed by the Imo State government, which also denies any direct or indirect involvement.
Declan Emelumba, the state’s information and strategy commissioner, made a statement yesterday in Owerri, the state’s capital, in which the government claimed that Ugochinyere “is such an insignificant personality with microscopic importance in the political firmament of the state to warrant any attention,” much less torching his home.
The commissioner emphasised that Ugochinyere involved the state government in his “habitual, untidy, web of lies” in an apparent effort to garner attention.
Emelumba lamented the fact that Ugochinyere had a reputation for making up accusations against Governor Uzodimma in order to garner unwarranted national attention.
The commissioner was happy that none of the accusations made against Uzodimma by the “opposition spokesman” had ever been found to be accurate.
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“At any rate, His Excellency, Senator Hope Uzodimma, the Executive Governor of Imo State, has been in politics for more than 40 years and has never been linked to any kind of violence,”
“A man who is at loggerheads with his party’s national chairman; a man who is working with anti-democratic forces to cancel the upcoming elections and a man at loggerheads with some of his kinsmen, should know when nemesis is after him and stop crying wolf. His ordeal is certainly not from the Imo State government.”
“From the so-called Omuma voters’ register magic to all his insults on the governor and the current one, all of them are mere falsehood aimed at attracting undue attention to himself,” he said.
Ugochinyere is allegedly “always terrified of his shadows” because of his violent and dishonest lifestyle, according to Emelumba.
The commissioner considered it odd that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which is the largest opposition party, found a way to denounce the most recent act of violence in the state since one of its members was engaged.
From the recent attack on former Governor Ikedi Ohakim to the burning of the governor’s country home, he said, the PDP never thought it appropriate to denounce the security lapses in the state.
The commissioner who urged security agencies to look into the incident in an effort to identify the perpetrators emphasised that, although he had refused to accept the possibility, Ugochinyere, who he characterised as an attention-seeker, might have stage-managed the burning of his own property in an effort to draw attention to himself and give the government a bad name, it did so.
