Labour Party Leaders and stakeholders from Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones, on Wednesday in Abuja, described and condemned in stern terms as “unacceptable serial inflammatory public statements and blackmail” by Mr. Abayomi Arabambi against Mr. Peter Obi, the presidential flag bearer of the party in the 2023 general elections.
It was the first time the party’s top echelons and stakeholders reacted to the statement made by Abayomi Arabambi, whom they described in a statement, as the designated National Publicity Secretary of the Lamidi Apapa-led faction of the party.
The statement was issued by the joint leadership of Labour Party Leaders Conference for National Consolidation (LPLCNC), Labour Party National Pressure Group (LPNPG) and the Labour Party Primary Elections Independent Observer Group (LPPEIOG).
A renowned leader of the party for many years and national trustee of the LPLCNC, Bishop Samuel Omede, led the chieftains of the South-South to the media outing.
Bishop Omede was Edo state chairman of Labour Party some eleven years ago, while the current National Chairman of the party, Barr. Julius Abure was state secretary under him beginning from 2012, during the Adams Oshiomhole administration as governor of Edo state.
The National Secretary of LPLCNC, Comrade Tony Akeni, who was also the Head of National Publicity, Contact & Mobilization Team of the Labour Party’s Presidential Campaign Council (LP-PCC) during the 2023 general elections, coordinated the media press release, which was jointly by Sunday Adukwu Esq. (South-East) Peter Oboyi Esq. and Dr. Ajibola Soetan (South-West), both of the Labour Party observer group LPPEIOG.
Other signatory stakeholders were Comrade Joseph Enan Maigari, Northern Nigeria coordinator of the Labour Party National Pressure Group (LPNPG) and Dr. Gwaya O. Emefesi (both representing North-East), Sheikh Rufai Al-Saddiq (North-Central) who is also the Grand Patron of the Northern Humanity Council (NHC). Comrade Sani Saeed Altukry and PCC Woman Leader Ladidi Martha Yusuf represented the North-West.
The statement, which was released on Wednesday, hours before the Supreme Court’s final judgement on the 2023 presidential election is as follows:
NATIONWIDE DISCLAIMER BY LABOUR PARTY LEADERS & STAKEHOLDERS OF ABAYOMI ARABAMBI’S SERIAL INFLAMMATORY BLACKMAIL AGAINST HE PETER OBI (1)
We leaders, elders and stakeholders of the Labour Party across the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria stand on our right as independent stakeholders and undertake the following solemn declaration.
1. We condemn in whole and in the gravest terms the serial, mercantile blackmail fed inexorably to the Nigerian public in endless inflammatory defamation and diatribes by Mr. Abayomi Arabambi, the designated Publicity Secretary of the Lamidi Apapa faction of the Labour Party, against the impeccable reputation and personality of our Presidential candidate in the 2023 elections, His Excellency Peter Obi.
2. While silence is considered wisdom by the sound and profound in mind, unfortunately silence also means consent to the simple-minded, misinformed and innocently uninformed who constitute the majority of society.
3. In a country as populous as Nigeria, it is unrealistic to assume that everyone is sound-minded or adequately informed and able to rightly decipher the truth in complex matters of public importance. Therefore, to continue to be silent in the face of Arabambi’s unrelenting and ambitious insanity to impress his blackmail paymasters is to assume that there is scarcity of mis-leadable public and risk leaving a considerable population of Nigerians to continue to feed on the river of maggots that flow from the cesspool of Arabambi’s dark soul. Hence this long overdue rejoinder has become undeferrably necessary.
4. Nigerians and the world, including shocked mainstream news media and TV networks, will recall that shortly after the Appeal Court constituted the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) in May to preside over the 2023 presidential election, Mr. Arabambi and those whose interest he serves immediately launched several outrageous acts of Trojan espionage which were patently designed to sabotage, frustrate and abort the Labour Party’s legal pursuit of our party’s presidential mandate at the PEPT.
4.1. First on May 19, 2023, Arabambi led his backers to carry out a naked sabotage mission to impersonate, displace and supplant the legal team which Peter Obi and the Labour Party engaged to prosecute our presidential mandate brief by presenting to the Justice Simon Tsammani tribunal his own one-man legal team to stand brief for Peter Obi. This double-agent mission was openly rejected with a query by the Appeal Court tribunal on the floor of the court.
4.2. When the above gambit failed, Arabambi launched a second mission of perfidy for his paymasters, which entailed frantic efforts to withdraw from the presidential tribunal the petition of our candidate, HE Peter Obi. Arabambi unabashedly proclaiming both within the court hall and on national TV networks that Bola Tinubu of the opponent APC, the opponent of the Labour Party’s candidate, won the February 25 Presidential Election, and that it was therefore a waste of time for our party to continue to pursue Peter Obi’s mandate recovery at the tribunal.
4.3. With the failure of Arabambi to have his Trojan lawyer pretentiously take over Peter Obi’s brief at the PEPT, as well as his campaign to withdraw Labour Party’s petition from the tribunal, Arabambi launched a desperate third blackmail expedition. This time it was to inflame and mislead the public with interviews on major TV networks and news media of the federation.
In the interviews, he claimed that while Peter Obi was yet an aspirant in the early days of joining our party and he, Arabambi, was a member of the party’s presidential primary screening body, he and Peter Obi breached the laws of the Electoral Act in the process that produced Obi as our Presidential candidate.
To make his vicious concoction appear believable, Arabambi indicted himself with open television “confessions” of monetary frauds which he claimed to have committed in the screening process and called on the authorities to prosecute him collaterally with other officers of the Labour Party.
The apparent goal of Arabambi’s fathomless perfidy was to provide a disqualification handle to the presidential election tribunal, as well as cause integrity distress to the public image and reputation of our candidate, HE Peter Obi. Again, Arabambi’s appalling venture to crave the pleasure and peanuts of his backers fell on its face.
4.4. On yet a fourth tangent, Mr. Abayomi Arabambi went on mainstream national media and online outlets to stridently declare that the academic credentials presented by our Labour Party’s Presidential candidate, HE Peter Obi, and which he, Arabambi, participated in screening from which Obi emerged as our Labour Party’s Presidential flag bearer back in May 2022 were impersonatory credentials of our candidate’s late elder brother.
This sadistic, satanic defamation by Arabambi was yet another inglorious sabotage strategem orchestrated to provide the Nigerian Supreme Court sitting on the judgment from the appellate tribunal a counter-balance to the now global scandal of countless falsified academic documents and forgery felonies ascribed to the electoral credentials of another candidate in the 2023 presidential election. How desperate, despicably treacherous and low can a human sink for transient fame and belly values. Even outhouse maggots cannot sink lower.
NIGHT SOIL MAN OF OPPOSITION
Within the splinter faction in our party to which Arabambi belongs, we are informed by those who know him well and barely tolerate him that for any scheme which can slip money into his pocket, Abayomi Arabambi would drink the pus that flows from the rancid wounds of a corpse and drench himself in its stench as cologne.
In his mindless, posterity dumb and damaged savagery, we are therefore certain that Arabambi is not done with his devil-may-care arsenal of fictitious filth against the well-earned reputation of our leader HE Peter Obi and our party’s collective harmony.
In Arabambi’s desperate ambition to be seen as a vocal and useful night soil man of any ruling political party and belong by all means to their kitchen pantry and cake table, we expect him to concoct some new figment of his imagination to appall again and again the minds of decent, right thinking Nigerians who have been following with disgust his vulture culture of avarice and rule or ruin politics.
But while he is at it, Arabambi blissfully forgets the African saying that if you sell your own brother, the buyer will never ever trust you. That no matter how much soak-away sewage and dung Arabambi empties from his soul against the Labour Party for the pleasure of his blackmail benefactors; that no matter the arrows he throws at HE Peter Obi who, ironically, is supposed to be his own Presidential candidate, his sponsors will never ever trust him but would permanently hold him in distrust and towering contempt with the dog-leash distance of a rabid dog, ensuring to keep him at arms length from their table. Time and posterity wait to serve him this truth.
In the annals of Nigeria’s, indeed entire Africa’s politics, there is no political party which approached its country’s post-election tribunal in lawful pursuit of recovering its stolen mandate and then had its own official ecstatically proclaim that it facilitated its own candidate to tender false academic credentials, including his other appalling self-indictments, all with a view to defame and subject its own candidate to disqualification.
Arabambi has set that unenviable record and is continuing to commit horrid political sacrilege whose long-term consequences against his name and future are dire. But like an atavistic imbecile riding in the exhilarating euphoria of amusement park swings, as long as Arabambi gets paid some mess of porridge for his instant gratification; as long as he has the occasional privilege to enjoy some of the maggots rolling from a corpse, the corpse of Nigeria, Arabambi is glad to tell his future and the values of a good name to go to hell.
WARNING / CONCLUSION
Several times during the factional incendiaries between the Julius Abure and Lamidi Apapa groups, we warned Arabambi through his faction’s leader, Alhaji Lamidi Apapa, who we clearly found out has never himself issued or signed a negative public statement against HE Peter Obi, neither approved one to be issued.
As the Apapa faction will recall, we wrote astringently to Alhaji Lamidi Apapa on September 7th and again on September 17th, 2023, among numerous other communications, for their faction to sternly prevail on Abayomi Arabambi to discontinue his vitriolic and unacceptable diatribes against the integrity and reputation of our party’s leader, HE Peter Obi.
In both correspondences cited above, which were necessarily copied to Comrade Anslem Eragbe, the Youth Leader of the Apapa faction for witness, we also observed to Alhaji Apapa that Arabambi’s “fight without object integrity and probity of purpose is like sailors’ bar fight: bloody, furious and lacerating yet without trophies, and a waste of bruises.”
In those correspondences which Comrade Tony Akeni was assigned to write on our behalves, we admonished that if the Apapa faction truly recognized Peter Obi as our party’s Presidential flag bearer and leader, they should put a leash and padlock on Arabambi’s neck and mouth, compel him to “refrain from incendiary public statements against our principal,” and to conduct himself with civilize restraint as other leaders of their faction have done.
Unfortunately, Arabambi has continued to prove that he is an irreparable political party destroyer without civilize self-control and restraint a tar that corrodes, infects and destroys anything he cannot conquer for his immediate pocket gratifications.
Finally, we wish to register here and for all time one incontestable fact. Irrespective of the ill-fated outcome of the Supreme Court judgement of October 26 on the 2023 presidential election, HE Peter Gregory Obi remains the undisputed leader of our Labour Party and the global rallying totem of modern Nigeria’s emancipation struggle, which is otherwise christened the ObiDient Movement.
As we warned in our previous communications, we will not condone anyone who lays claim to membership of the Labour Party yet breaks the hedge to make false denigrating, anti-party public statements, least to mention unfounded, inflammatory or defamatory statements against our global leader, HE Peter Obi. Neither any other integrity tested leader of our party. That admonition remains valid. Labour Party is one.
Be forewarned. Be forearmed.
SIGNED:
COMRADE TONY AKENI
National Secretary, Labour Party Leaders Conference for National Consolidation (LPLCNC)
BISHOP SAMUEL OMEDE
National Trustee, Labour Party Leaders Conference for National Consolidation (LPLCNC), Labour Party Primary Elections Independent Observer Group (LPPEIOG)
DR. (MRS) HALIMA MAIKANO
(LPLCNC)
OBOYI PETER, ESQ.
Labour Party Primary Elections Independent Observer Group (LPPEIOG), South-South
ADUKWU SUNDAY, ESQ.
LPPEIOG, South-East
HON. JOSEPH ENAN MAIGARI
Labour Party National Pressure Group (LPNPG), North-East
SHEIKH RUFAI AL-SADDIQ
LPNPG North-Central, Grand Patron Northern Humanity Council (NHC)
DR. GWAYA O. EMEFESI
LP PCC/WPO Woman Leader, LPNPG North-East
COMRADE SANI SAEED ALTUKRY
LP PCC Coordinator/LPNPG North-West
LADIDI M. YUSUF
LP PCC Woman Leader/LPNPG North-West
