The Senator Athan Achonu Campaign Organisation has received with amusement, a contrived piece of trash on social media by one Frank Nwaete, a hireling of opponents of the towering incoming governor of Imo State.

The garbage, fraudulently captioned, “Agu Otu Aka loses again in court”, claimed that the Court of Appeal in Owerri, had given a judgment, throwing out Achonu’s application to be joined in a matter, pending before it “in clear favour of Ikenga Joseph Ikechukwu Ukaegbu, whom a Federal High Court has since affirmed the authentic Labour Party governorship candidate for the Saturday, November 11, 2023 Imo State governorship election.”

For the avoidance of doubt, the judgement on rejoinder by the Appeal Court does not in any way affect and has absolutely no bearing on the authenticity of Senator Athan Achonu as the duly elected governorship candidate of the Imo State Labour Party, after a properly organised primary election, which was conducted by the Primary Election Committee, constituted by the recognised national leadership of the Labour Party, and supervised by officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, on April 15, 2023.

As far as we are concerned, this was and remains the only Imo Labour Party governorship primary election conducted on April 15 and even the INEC has corroborated and justified our position by publishing and boldly displaying the name of Senator Athan Achonu, as the Imo State Labour Party governorship candidate with Hon. Tony Nwulu, as his running mate, on its list of qualified candidates for the November 11 gubernatorial election.

We will refrain from joining issues with the obviously half-baked, semi-literate Frank Nwaete, whose knowledge and interpretation of court processes and judgements are, to say the least, crude, pedestrian and imaginary. But it behooves on us to undertake the very important responsibility of setting the records straight on what exactly transpired at the Court of Appeal, for Imolites.

What actually happened was that Senator Achonu had applied to be joined in the appeal entered before the Appeal Court, arising from the judgment of the Bayelsa/Owerri Federal High Court, which implied that an impostor, who did not even participate in the authentic Imo Labour Party guber primaries on April 15, 2023, is now claiming to wear the artificial robes of ‘a candidate ‘.

The appeals wherein joinder was applied for, was simply to provide us the legal platform to establish before the court that whatever process on which the Bayelsa/Owerri judgment was derived from is unknown to us and we are not even aware of any other contrived or hallucinatory pantomime in the name of primary election, except the one which Senator Athan Achonu won convincingly.

We are very much aware and we state categorically that the Federal High Court in Bayelsa/Owerri only gave judgement on the matter, which was presented by one Basil Maduka, claiming that he emerged from a purported primary election, which the court definitively stated without equivocation that he (Basil Maduka) did not even have the locus standi to bring such a matter before it, since the process he was trying to justify is completely unknown and non-existent to the court.

Basil Maduka had then proceeded to the Court of Appeal to challenge the Federal High Court judgement and having been fully briefed on the outcome of the lower court, and as a party that believes in due process, our legal team opted to explore the legitimate possibility of setting the records straight and establishing before a competent court of law, the incontrovertible fact that Senator Athan Achonu is and remains the authentic Imo State Labour Party governorship candidate for the November 11 gubernatorial election.

However, the Appellate Court in its well reasoned judicial wisdom, ruled that, while it recognised and applauded the intention to set the records straight, there was really no need for Senator Athan Achonu to even bother or worry himself with the application for rejoinder since he was not even mentioned as a party to the substantive matter, which has been decisively dealt with at the Federal High Court level.

The court went further to note that the Labour Party, which is the primary subject of the matter, has already appealed and Senator Athan Achonu, being the candidate of the party, does not need to join, especially since he was not specifically petitioned or involved in the main suit.

Let the fact also be established clearly that since Senator Athan Achonu wasn’t joined in the appeals, it automatically means that the Appeal Court does not have the power or authority to make a finding against him.

Achonu’s application for joinder in the APPEAL NOs: CA/0W/200/2023 and CA/0W/201/2023 was, therefore, in his capacity as “the authentic candidate of the 1st Respondent (Labour Party) for the Imo State governorship election fixed for 11th of November 2023” and an interested but not necessarily party to the proceedings.

The glaring fallacy of Frank Nwaete’s submission that ‘Agu Otu Aka loses again’, can only be put down to the obvious fact that he must be a bogey man, who lets his fancy run too wide and wild to cook up such drivel that ‘Agu Otu Aka loses again’.

It is indeed also a mystery where he got the alcohol-fuelled impression that the Appeal Court “highly favoured” Ikenga without adducing evidence, which fatally injured his tales by moonlight, more so, when Athan Achonu, the authentic flag holder, was never part of the suit.

We find the desperation and irrational extremism, which has continued to fuel the detractors of Senator Athan Achonu, very worrisome, such that they have remained obdurate in feeding the unsuspecting public with falsehood, designed only to deceive and mislead the people.

For the avoidance of doubts, Sen. Athan Nneji Achonu remains the legitimate candidate of the Labour Party in the November governorship election in Imo State, and he has since been listed as such in the records of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.

Nwaete’s narrative is nothing but the usual misinformation by a few mischievous political tragi-comedians suborned to distract Senator Athan Nneji Achonu from the mission to rescue Imo from shifty buccaneers.

However, whatever the monkeyshines of these stragglers, the quest to restore the glory of Imo State is ‘Athanable’!

Chibuikem Diala
Director, Media & Publicity
10/8/23