Reno Omokri, a former presidential aide, has slammed the Anambra State government.
He knocked Anambra State for setting up a panel over the controversy surrounding the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) result of Ejikeme Mmesoma.
Messoma has been in the news since the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) punctured her claim of being the highest scorer in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
JAMB had said she scored 249 in the examination as against the 362 which she claimed, but the candidate released a video where she stood her ground.
This had triggered a huge controversy. Amid the back and forth, Governor Charles Soludo of Anambra set up a committee to investigate the issue.
But few days into the sitting of the eight-man panel of inquiry, Mmesoma appeared on a television programme where she backed down on her claim of scoring 362.
Commenting on the report of the committee, Omokri said the government should not have gone that far to probe what had been confirmed as a lie.
He said, “Why would the Anambra State Government set up a high-powered committee, filled with Professors and PhDs, to investigate Mmesoma Ejikeme’s JAMB result? The result is obviously fake. The owner of the centre where she took the exam (Osita Chidoka), has revealed that it is questionable. The girl (more accurately, WOMAN) herself admitted as much during her Channels TV interview.
“JAMB is not cheating Anambra State. They have acquitted themselves excellently in this regard. They came up with documentary proof to show any objective onlooker that this is a case of pure criminality, devoid of ethnic bias. Anambra State is cheating itself by wasting human and material resources on a lie. Henceforth, they should not complain that their federal allocation is not enough. They obviously have money to waste! This is what happens when you make a criminal matter an ethnic issue.
“Indigenes of Kaduna, Osun, Lagos and Oyo states were also accused of fraud by JAMB. Those ones went to hide and bury their heads in shame, because they know their ethnic groups and states have little tolerance for their criminality. But Mmesoma was bold because she knew she would get support.
“Why not? She has already seen how the owners of structurally defective buildings at Alaba market got support purely based on their ethnicity, despite being warned since 2017. She saw how some Nigerians used their ethnicity to almost paralyse the evacuation efforts of Nigerians in Sudan. So, she had enough examples to make her confident that she could get away with it.
“And she is right. Instead of her being shamed by the Anambra State Government, she is being protected. The same Anambra State Government that did not constitute a high-powered panel of inquiry to find out who was behind the killings of @USinNigeria embassy staff in Anambra on May 16, 2023, or to fish out those who killed a pregnant Northern Muslim woman, Harira Jubril, and her four underaged children, were crudely murdered in cold blood on the streets of Anambra State, with her four underage daughters, Fatima 9 years, Khadija 7 years, Hadiza 5 years, and Zaituna 2 years, has now put together a powerful committee to protect refuge golden girl (or woman), Mmesoma!
“If I was the Governor of Anambra, the first high powered committee I would set up would be a committee of Anambra’s brightest and most brilliant minds to look into how to put an end to the menace of IPOB’s Monday Sit-at-Home, that is costing my state billions of Naira weekly, as well as the malaise of insecurity caused by unknown gunmen.
“But no. Anambra State does not have time for that. Their money and time is better spent constituting a committee of professors to investigate a JAMB result whose fakery you can spot in less than five minutes!”