Journalist Lere Olayinka; Senior Special Assistant on Public Communications and Social Media to the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, Nyesom Wike, has fired back at the 2023 presidential candidate of the Action Alliance Congress(AAC), Omoyele Sowore, for accusing his principal of corruption.
Olayinka hits at Sowore, saying the activist and publisher of SaharaReporters, was only afraid of his past that was riddled with record of scams.
According to Wike’s aide, the activist is haunted by his “scamming shadow.”
He dismissed Sowore’s allegation that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Wike wanted to assassinate him as “one of the mind games he plays to sustain his life of scams.”
In a statement on Saturday, Olayinka advised Sowore to focus on his criminal trial and prepare himself to avail the court of any judgement in which President Tinubu was once convicted to defend his reckless statement.
Cataloguing the alleged past misdeeds of Sowore, The FCT Minister’s aide said: “Someone like Sowore, who collected over $3 million in 2019 to sell the governorship ticket of the African Action Congress (AAC) in Rivers State and was suspended by the party for corruption must have a lot of victims of his scams to contend with.
“In 2020, this same Sowore was accused by Oluwatosin Adeniji of pocketing an #EndSARS grant, which he (Sowore) applied for on her behalf without her knowledge.
“Between 2016 and 2019, Sowore collected $1.3 million from MacArthur Foundation and has been collecting millions of Dollars from other foreign donors, for the purpose of training journalists in Nigeria, which he never did.
“He is also known for using his online medium, SaharaReporters to blackmail and extort money from people while keeping his staff in abject poverty.
“Therefore, if there is any threat to the life of Sowore, it must be from those he had scammed or blackmailed. He should leave President Tinubu and the FCT Minister out of the impending repercussions of his life of scams.”
Olayinka, who said Sowore was already getting closer to the end of his wit, added that, “All the noise he has been making about Wike in the last 48 hours is just the last kick of a dying horse. He knows the consequences and gravity of the charges against him. He is, therefore, playing his usual mind game so as to present himself as a victim in order to sustain his scams.
“He is running riot about purchase of properties in United States. Did the Minister deny that his wife has properties in the US? Is it an offence for anyone to own properties in the US through inheritance or purchase?
“And is that Sowore’s defence for publishing outright falsehood and calling the President a criminal?
“Is that his defense for collecting $3 million to sell his party’s governorship ticket, and keeping silence when people were killed in Rivers State in 2019 to force the candidate on whom he was paid on the people of Rivers State?
“Is that his defensc for doing Yahoo Yahoo by collecting millions of dollars from foreign donors under false pretense?
“Like I have maintained, Sowore can only run and hide under Cashtivist for a while, he will get to the end of his scamming wit soon.”
