Former Senate President Ken Nnamani has initiated at least two moves to assist a controversial government contractor, Emeka Offor, to grapple with two severe challenges facing the businessman. Mr. Nnamani and the government contractor have a chummy relationship. Offor made the senator chairman of the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company, which the Goodluck Jonathan administration handed over to Offor on November 1, 2013, in very controversial circumstances.
Former Senate President Ken Nnamani has initiated at least two moves to assist a controversial government contractor, Emeka Offor, to grapple with two severe challenges facing the businessman. Mr. Nnamani and the government contractor have a chummy relationship. Offor made the senator chairman of the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company, which the Goodluck Jonathan administration handed over to Offor on November 1, 2013, in very controversial circumstances.
The first move by Senator Nnamani is to help raise funds to enable Offor, one of the leading beneficiaries of the 16 years in which the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was in power from 1999 to 2015, to bury his late father. Mr. Offor, whose businesses have collapsed since the exit of the Goodluck Jonathan administration, has been reluctant to bury his father, Bennett Offor, fondly called Nnakaibeya by his kinsmen. The older Offor died last February in his hometown of Oraifite in Anambra State. Our sources said Emeka Offor’s father passed away a few months after a minor scuffle with a family member.
A relative of the businessman’s deceased father accused Emeka Offor, who likes to be addressed as Sir E., of delaying his father’s burial to enable him to source hundreds of millions of naira with which to impress the public. “Sir Emeka Offor just wants to use Nnakaibeya’s funeral as an opportunity to display wealth. But we know he has not paid his workers for more than a year because he is no longer swimming in cash,” said the relative.
Our correspondent learned that former Senate President Nnamani has called a meeting of a number of wealthy Nigerians to hold in his residence in Abuja on Tuesday, September 20. One of the men invited to the meeting disclosed that Mr. Nnamani is requesting that he and other guests donate generously to help Mr. Offor to bury his father in November.
The late Offor was a police inspector who was demoted to sergeant following a petition of blackmail, intimidation, bribery and corruption against him by Ignatius Nwabueze, a schoolteacher who lost his position as the organist of St. Martin’s Catholic Church, Ihiala, in Anambra State when the church discovered that he was a secret member of the Rosicrucian Order, a mystical group based in California. The Catholic Church regards the Rosicrucian Order as a secret cult.
Business has been rough for Offor since President Muhammadu Buhari assumed office on May 29, last year, as all his offices in Abuja have been closed down. One employee of the controversial businessman told our correspondent, “Sir Emeka Offor has not paid salaries since May, 2015.”
Our correspondent learned that Valentine Orji, another former employee of Mr. Offor’s who was also a classmate of Mr. Offor’s at Abbot Boys Secondary School in Ihiala in the 1970s, has been complaining to friends that the businessman treated him with great contempt and humiliation. One mutual friend said Mr. Orji has expressed regret that he abandoned his thriving advertising practice to handle communication matters for Mr. Offor’s Chrome Group.
Our correspondent reported that the second step Senator Nnamani is taking was to assist Mr. Offor to reach the inner circle of the Muhammadu Buhari administration—and, preferably, the president himself. Sources aware of Mr. Nnamani’s plans said the erstwhile Senate President was angling to lead the Southeast group in an impending dialogue with the Federal Government. Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo had strongly recommended the idea during his private meeting last July 25, stating that such a dialogue with Buhari was key to dousing tensions arising from the activities of separatist agitations by groups like the Movement for the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) as well as the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA).
Among the persons working for Mr. Nnamani in this project are Osita Izunaso, the national organizing secretary of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), who is a former journalist and a senator from Imo State, and George Moghalu from Nnewi in Anambra State, a former national secretary of the All Peoples Party, one of the parties which collapsed into the APC. If Mr. Nnamani heads the Igbo delegation, a source familiar with the intrigues told our correspondent, it would enhance his political credentials and thus his ability to broker a deal for Mr. Offor at the Presidency.
However, Mr. Nnamani may be up to a tough task, as President Buhari late last year warned his powerful chief of staff Abba Kyari against allowing “Aso Rock contractors like Emeka Offor” into State House. A source at the Presidency told our correspondent that President Buhari believes such unscrupulous business people collaborated with various PDP governments to ruin the national economy and destroy social values.
In a separate development, our correspondent learned that the marital feud in Offor’s family has taken a turn for the worse following an article to launder Mr. Offor’s image. The piece, written by Chinwe Ugwu, an Enugu-based female politician, appeared in Thisday of Sunday, September 3. According to a family source, Mr. Offor’s three wives are infuriated that Ms. Ugwu, a supposed mistress of the woe-betide businessman, had the effrontery to write a sweetheart article on their husband in a public forum. “Sir E.’s wives are very angry, especially since the woman praising their husband had a notorious breakup of her marriage to one Frank Oloto.” The wives are reportedly threatening to deal with both Ms. Ugwu and Mr. Offor for the effrontery.
The embattled businessman had earlier been grappling with several family feuds, including a minor squabble between his father and another family member, leading to his father’s fall and subsequent death, and the physical takeover of his Oraifite country home by his first wife, Nkiru, along with her children. Mr. Offor’s relatives told our correspondent that Nkiru and her children descended on Oraifite, forcibly changed all the locks and dismissed all domestic workers employed by Offor. Nkiru has accused her estranged husband of attempting to kill her through spiritual means following a partial stroke she suffered last January. She has, in addition, told some relatives that Mr. Offor has deep hatred for her children, accusing him of abandoning their first son Chuka in the streets of London and of refusing to bless the union between their first daughter, Ndidi, who is a 32-year-old lawyer, and a man from the southwestern part of Nigeria, even though that relationship has produced children.
BY SAHARA REPORTERS
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