The viral picture of the Presidential candidate of Labour Party, Peter Obi, and executive chairman of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission (NiDCOM), Hon. Abike Dabiri-Erewa, and a lady in supposed UK Border Force Officers’ uniform has been found to be photoshoped.
Obi was briefly detained by UK border agency on arriving at Heathrow Airport during Easter on suspicion of identity theft, with him later found to be the victim.
The incident made the headlines, with an aide of President Muhammadu Buhari, Bashir Ahmad, and a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, Adamu Garba, taking to twitter to slight the Obidients and claimed the federal government through Abike Dabiri-Erewa came to Obi’s rescue, with the controversial picture added to prove their point.
On the contrary, NiDCOM in a statement by its spokesperson and head of Media, Public Relations and Protocol Unit, Abdur-Rahman Balogun, distanced Dabiri from the incident describing the picture as a social media stunt; “Our attention has been called to the above social media stunt which has gone viral. Aunty Abike Dabiri-Erewa is NOT in UK and NOT in a position to secure the release of any Nigerian suspected to be under UK interrogation. So, members of the public should disregard the information in its entirety.”
Scrutiny has also revealed the picture is a combination of an image of a movie produced in 2010, an episode of Fighting Crime At The Border, entitled, Something Swallowed, Something Blue, that of the former Anambra governor with ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo and a the NiDCOM boss with a military chief.
In the episode, the man in the picture arrived the UK from Spain having ingested illicit drugs.
