THE Coalition of South East Youth Leaders, COSEYL, the apex socio-political youth group in the South East geopolitical zone makes bold to say that the British Immigration delay of the Labour Party, LP, Presidential Candidate His Excellency Mr Peter Obi is a desperate move by the All Progressive Congress, APC, to have Peter Obi in handcuffs pictures on the front pages of foreign and local newspapers. Truly, drug lords and their money are really at work.
Goodluck Ibem, president general of COSEYL, stated this in a statement on Sunday, April 16, that “Findings confirmed that somebody who is an agent of the APC presently at large is impersonating Mr Peter Obi in other to portray a man of integrity as a man of questionable character. We warn the APC and their agents to be careful and stop insulting the sensibility of Nigerians.”
According to him, “Since the Presidential Candidate of the Labour Party (LP) Mr Peter Obi and his party submitted their petition against the conduct and announcement of the winner of the 2023 general election by INEC, we’ve watched carefully the conspiracy from the All Progressive Congress, APC, a political party filled with people of questionable characters and a team of desperate people against Peter Obi.
“Initially, we thought it was just a mere political gymnastics noticeable in Nigerian politics, but the revelation by renowned Professor Stella Okunna of the recent impersonation of Obi at Heathrow Airport in the United Kingdom has revealed to us that some desperate politicians do not wish Nigeria well and want to set this country on fire.”
Part of the statement reads: “COSEYL is hereby using this medium to warn all those who are not willing to allow the Judiciary or the Presidential Election Tribunal to do their job but chose to use all manner of antics including frame-up, impersonation and all manner of dirty stratagem as alternatives to be very careful because the tree they think they can cut easily is owned by a people and we’re not ready to let go.
“It is visible to the blind and audible to the deaf in Nigeria that if Mr Peter Obi had any criminal record in Nigeria or outside Nigeria, he would have been in a big mess because he has been the only name in the mouths of those who have been holding Nigeria down since last year when he picked up a presidential nomination form.
“We all watched the campaigns. The only negative statement against him was that he had no structure and that he goes to the church to campaign which were all wrong anyway. Nobody said anything criminal against him because such doesn’t exist and he has never been convicted nor linked to anything narcotic or fraud related issues.
“After the election, the people who felt they won were the first to ask any angry person to go to court and avoid violence. As usual, Peter Obi not being as ordinary as any other person they expected, went to court with angles they never expected and since then, it has been media persecution and all manner of evil responses against him aimed at demonizing him for choosing the right way of settling dispute.
“COSEYL is using this medium to make it clear to those who are hitting up Nigeria and have now extended their madness to the diaspora to realise that they have started what they cannot finish because their actions in the UK will continue to hunt them and we’ll not let it lie low.
“If they love this country, they should be thinking of how to allow the judiciary to either authenticate their mandate which Obi argues wasn’t deserved or throw it away. However, if they think they can go dirty, we all will roll in the mould and get dirty because enough is enough.
“They’ve done their worst by duplicating Obi’s identity, a move that placed his life in danger because it is obvious someone is impersonating him.
“All these evildoers want to implicate Obi in all manner of dubious and criminal activities, and rope him into offences he knew nothing about. They just wanted to frame him up for any criminal act the impersonator does.
“Why are they doing this? They just want to use such embarrassing stories to demonize Obi using various newspaper pages, radio stations and television stations available to them before the court in Nigeria will even decide anything.
“People whose criminal records are all over the internet are desperately looking for a channel to create some criminal records for Obi so that when their numerous criminal records are opened, they will equally point at those ones they created and hanged on him, but they’ve failed.
“It is really funny that some people will go this far just to prove that someone else can be as corrupt and unclean as they are as well. Well, they must realize that every Nigerian is not a criminal and Obi is one of such who is not a criminal because if he is, we all know he will never be allowed to even contest in the first place.
“COSEYL is equally using this medium to charge the British government to prove to the whole world that it still has one of the best police in the world by arresting the impersonator and revealing their paymasters because Nigerians are interested in their shame.
“Obi went to court after the election because he felt the election was not properly conducted, a feeling that many Nigerians share with him, so, what’s wrong with going to court? Were the people framing Obi expecting him to ask his supporters to take a violent way to express themselves?
“What way is better in a democracy to express your anger if not by going through the Judiciary? Why are they afraid of the same court they asked Obi to go to to the extent that they’re currently using some people including prominent people whose consciences are dead, to demonize Obi and Obidients?
“Since the UK impersonation has failed, they can as well try another thing in the USA, Canada and other Western countries, but our message to them is that they have started what they cannot finish.
“They can only operate where their knowledge end. Since they’re looking for Peter Obi’s pictures in handcuffs to put on the front pages of their newspapers, they must realize that nobody has the monopoly to dirty games.
“They can recruit all the criminal gangs in Europe, they can as well pay all the mafia groups in America and Asia, but they must realize that no country is ready to stain their name, join them to wrongly embarrass a man who is only fighting for something he believes was done wrong.
“For all prominent Nigerians keeping quiet about what’s happening to Obi and how some criminals are spending their fortunes just to demonize him, I urge them to remember the post-war confessional prose by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller.
“He said, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
“Niemöller used this statement to correct the silence of German intellectuals and certain clergy including himself for sitting on the fence during the Nazis’ incremental purging and torturing of their chosen targets while those who felt unconcerned watched in silence.
“We, therefore, say that all those who are seeing what’s going on in Nigeria today including framing one of our best and impersonating him in a foreign land to rope him into a crime, but chose to keep quiet to realize that if the people doing this succeeds with Obi, they will still do the worst to them and they will have nowhere to hide when the time comes.
“The time to collectively stand against the enemies of our nation who are hell-bent on taking power through the back door in other to share our collective commonwealth within themselves is now.”