Politics
Group working to recall Senator Dafinone for ‘sleeping in senate’.
Senator representing Delta central, Senator Ede Dafinone has been accused of sleeping during session and his constituents have threatened to commence the legislator’s recall from the national assembly.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) senator, was elected to office in 2023. The recall move is being pushed by the Delta state chapter of the Nigeria Polling Unit Forum, led by Nicholas Evwienure, accusing the representative of non-performance.
Evwienure, said at a press briefing in Asaba on Friday, that the group is also demanding Dafinone’s resignation.
“We, the eligible registered voters across party lines of Delta central’s electoral district, are appealing to the senator representing Delta central, Ede Dafinone, to resign honourably or face recall,” he said.
Abel John-Gold, one of the constituents, expressed support for the process to debar others from similar acts, saying “Ede is sleeping in the senate, Ede has failed us, I strongly support the recall of Senator Ede Dafinone,”
“He has failed in every ramification. He even forgot those who worked for him, he forgot those who campaigned for him. He forgot all his supporters.”
Meanwhile, other constituents are of different opinion, like Nelson Egware, said it is too early to judge the lawmaker’s performance, saying “For me, he has not done badly, because you cannot use two years to gauge the performance of a legislator,” he said.
While a female constituent, Josephine Omo-Dion, was supportive of the senator, saying “I don’t think it’s necessary at this stage because he still has like two more years to go.”
“He should be given time to bring in more things. At the end of these two years, if he is seen not to have made much impact, the electorate, which includes me, will decide to send him back there or not.”
A recall is a process that allows voters to remove a serving lawmaker before the end of their tenure.
A former Buhari anti-corruption chief now faces fresh criminal allegations — but are these the consequences of genuine wrongdoing, or the price of powerful enemies?
By Crime Correspondent, February 20, 2026
On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 19, 2026, operatives of the Cross River State Police Command moved quietly through Ugep town in Yakurr Local Government Area and placed a man in handcuffs near the Abuja Park motor park. The man was no ordinary citizen. He was Okoi Ofem Obono-Obla — a lawyer, a former presidential aide, and the man who once ran Nigeria’s most powerful asset recovery body under President Muhammadu Buhari.
Within hours, his supporters were on social media claiming he had been kidnapped by unknown gunmen. The police, in a swift and unusually detailed statement, pushed back hard. The Cross River State Police Command confirmed the arrest was carried out lawfully, and that it followed a petition submitted to the commissioner of police alleging offences of forgery and obtaining admission or professional qualification — including entry into the legal profession — by false pretence.
He was subsequently taken to the State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID) in Calabar, where investigations are ongoing.
The command dismissed circulating reports suggesting abduction, stating categorically that “allegations of kidnapping or involvement of unidentified security outfits are false, unfounded, and entirely without factual basis.”
His lawyer has been informed and is involved in the process. His family knows where he is.
But the question that hangs over this arrest — as it has over every proceeding involving this man — is far older and far more corrosive: did Okoi Obono-Obla ever legitimately qualify to be a lawyer in the first place?
A Sudden Rise, A Sudden Fall
Obono-Obla’s elevation to national prominence came in 2016, when President Buhari appointed him Senior Special Assistant to the President on Prosecution at the Federal Ministry of Justice. Simultaneously, he was made chairman of the Special Presidential Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property (SPIP) — a body mandated with the enormous and politically sensitive task of recovering assets looted from the Nigerian state.
By all accounts, he pursued that role with aggression. In an interview on the MIC ON podcast hosted by Seun Akinbaloye, he described pursuing offshore assets, armoured Mercedes fleets, and multi-million-pound property portfolios tied to politically connected figures. He claimed, remarkably, that some of the assets his panel recovered were subsequently returned to their original owners after he submitted reports to the Presidency and then-Attorney General Abubakar Malami.
“Through the Panama Papers, we discovered offshore properties worth over £200 million belonging to a prominent former governor and senator,” he stated. “Despite submitting detailed reports to the president and the Attorney General, no actions were taken.”
Whether those claims are accurate, exaggerated, or self-serving is difficult to independently verify. What is documented, however, is that his tenure at SPIP generated enormous controversy — not only over those he investigated, but over the man doing the investigating.
The ICPC File: Certificate Forgery and Diverted Funds
In August 2019, President Buhari suspended Obono-Obla as chairman of the panel following an investigation by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) over alleged falsification of records and financial impropriety. In October 2019, ICPC declared him wanted over his repeated failure to appear before it to answer questions about fraud and corruption allegations.
His dismissal letter — unusual in its specificity — stated that he would face criminal prosecution and raised the prospect of the University of Jos withdrawing his law degree and the Nigerian Law School debarring him from practice. That was a remarkable, almost unprecedented threat for a government sack notice.
ICPC arrested him in Abuja in March 2020. He legally challenged the ICPC’s authority to investigate certificate forgery, but the courts dismissed that challenge in May 2020, clearing the path for his formal arraignment in January 2021.
What followed was a complex, layered prosecution. ICPC, in a 10-count charge before the FCT High Court in Apo, Abuja, accused Obono-Obla of knowingly presenting a fake O’Level result — a credit pass in English Literature — to the University of Jos to secure admission to study law.
The commission alleged that while Obono-Obla did not sit for the GCE Ordinary Level in English Literature in 1982, he presented a result of that same examination, containing a Credit 6 from Mary Knoll College, Ogoja, to the university in 1985.
He was also charged, alongside his Senior Adviser on Protocol Aliyu Ibrahim and the Managing Director of ABR Global Petroleum Resources Limited, Daniel Omughele, with diverting funds meant for SPIP office furniture. The charge alleged that the three men diverted N18.2 million out of N19.9 million released by the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation for the furnishing of SPIP’s offices. All three pleaded not guilty.
In March 2021, the charges were amended. ICPC alleged in the revised charge that Obono-Obla and Ibrahim conspired to divert N10,174,000 — part of N15,187,917 paid to contractors by the NDIC — into the account of ABR Global Petroleum Resources, a company in which Ibrahim held a directorship. The third defendant was discharged as part of that amendment.
In October 2021, ICPC separately arraigned Obono-Obla before the High Court of Plateau State in Jos, on a two-count charge of certificate forgery — specifically, that he presented a forged GCE result to gain admission to the University of Jos to study law. He again pleaded not guilty.
The NBA Watching
The Nigerian Bar Association has responded to the latest arrest with cautious engagement. The NBA confirmed it is monitoring the situation closely and that it is committed to ensuring Obono-Obla’s constitutional rights are protected. Its representative stressed he should be given a fair opportunity to defend himself and have access to proper legal representation, warning that the NBA’s human rights committee would intervene if necessary.
As of the time of writing, Obono-Obla has not publicly responded to the latest arrest.
Political Witch-Hunt or Pattern of Conduct?
The “witch-hunt” argument is one that Obono-Obla’s supporters have raised repeatedly, and it deserves serious scrutiny rather than dismissal. He is a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC). His arrest comes under a Tinubu administration that has no particular loyalty to Buhari-era operatives. He made public statements implicating powerful figures in corruption and claiming his recovered assets were returned to looters by the Buhari administration itself — allegations that would embarrass the political class broadly.
It is also true that Nigerian anti-corruption investigations have historically been weaponised against political opponents, and that petitions to police commissioners can be filed by anyone with a grievance, however motivated.
But here is what the record shows: the core allegation — that Obono-Obla entered the legal profession using forged credentials — was not invented by the Tinubu government, the current Cross River police commissioner, or any political adversary of recent vintage. It was first formally raised under the Buhari administration, by Buhari’s own anti-graft agency. The ICPC investigation predates any plausible political motive by the current government. The court challenge to ICPC’s jurisdiction — a legal route that failed — was pursued years before the current political climate.
The specific allegation is also extraordinarily specific: that he did not sit for a GCE English Literature examination in 1982, but presented a result from that examination to the University of Jos three years later. This is the kind of allegation that is either comprehensively provable or comprehensively disprovable through examination board records. It is not the sort of allegation typically conjured from thin air.
What the latest Cross River arrest adds — and what should concern observers — is a question of forum shopping and coordination. If the ICPC has been prosecuting these same allegations since 2021 in Abuja and Jos courts, why is the Cross River State Police now receiving a fresh petition on the same core facts? Who filed that petition, and why now? These are legitimate questions about process that deserve answers — not because Obono-Obla is necessarily innocent, but because Nigeria’s justice system must not allow parallel prosecutions to become instruments of harassment, whatever the underlying merits.
What We Know, and What Remains Unresolved
The facts, as they stand, are these: Okoi Obono-Obla was a practicing lawyer and senior government official who has faced, and continues to face, allegations that he never legitimately qualified for either role. Those allegations were first formally raised by Nigeria’s anti-corruption establishment in 2019. Courts have ruled against his procedural challenges. He has been arraigned multiple times, in multiple jurisdictions, and has consistently pleaded not guilty. None of these cases have yet produced a conviction — but none have been resolved in his favour either.
He now sits in the SCID in Calabar, and an old question remains conspicuously unanswered: how did a man allegedly armed with forged school results make it all the way to the office of the Presidency, charged with hunting Nigeria’s looters?
The irony, if the allegations prove true, would be almost too stark to bear.
— Additional reporting from court filings, ICPC official statements, and Cross River State Police Command communications.
EDITOR’S FACT-CHECK NOTES:
- The original draft referred to the fraud figure as “N19.9 million” throughout. This is accurate for the initial January 2021 arraignment but was amended to approximately N10.1 million in the March 2021 rearraignment when charges were revised and one defendant discharged. Both figures appear in credible court records and refer to different charge iterations.
- The original draft stated the court challenge was dismissed “in May 2020” — confirmed accurate by multiple sources.
- The original draft cited “January 2021” as the formal arraignment date — confirmed accurate (January 22, 2021).
- The latest arrest date is February 19, 2026, not vaguely described. Confirmed by TheCable, Premium Times, TheGuild, and the official police statement. Two minor outlets (Blueprint, Information Nigeria) incorrectly cited January 19 — this appears to be a typo.
- The claim about recovered assets being “returned to looters” comes from Obono-Obla’s own unverified interview statements and has not been independently confirmed
Waterwaysnews.ng is committed to professionalism in journalism. Fact-checked stories are essential to public good.
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BIRTHDAY FELICITATIONS TO HER EXCELLENCY OLOROGUN AMBASSADOR (DR.) MRS. OMODORO ADESEYE OGUNLEWE
BIRTHDAY FELICITATIONS TO HER EXCELLENCY OLOROGUN AMBASSADOR (DR.) MRS OMODORO ADESEYE OGUNLEWE
The Chairman of the Urhobo Progress Union (UPU) Onisiwo Island Apapa sub-branch, Captain Osaweren Oghenevwoke Larry, has extended his heartfelt birthday wishes to Her Excellency Olorogun Ambassador (Dr) Mrs. Omodoro Adeseye-Ogunlewe, President of Urhobo Nation for Tinubu 2027 (UNT2027).
In a statement released from his Onisiwo Kingdom residence in Lagos, Captain Larry expressed profound admiration for the celebrant’s exemplary leadership and dedication to the advancement of the Urhobo Nation.
“On behalf of the UPU Onisiwo Island Apapa Sub-branch and the entire Onisiwo Kingdom communities, I felicitate with Her Excellency Olorogun Amb. Dr. Mrs Omodoro Adeseye Ogunlewe on the auspicious occasion of her birthday,” Captain Larry stated.
The UPU sub-branch chairman lauded Her Excellency’s visionary leadership as President of Urhobo Nation for Tinubu 2027, noting her instrumental role in fostering unity among the Urhobo people and strengthening strategic political ties and alliances for the purpose.
HER EXCELLENCY OLOROGUN DR. MRS OMODORO ADESEYE OGUNLEWE
“Her Excellency’s unwavering commitment to nation-building and her tireless advocacy for the Tinubu 2027 project, exemplify true leadership and patriotism. As a staunch supporter of this noble cause, I am inspired by her dedication to the collective progress of the Urhobos in particular and our nation Nigeria in general.” Captain Larry remarked.
He prayed for divine blessings, robust health, increased wisdom, and continued strength for Her Excellency to sustain her transformative leadership.
“May this new year of your life bring abundant joy, unprecedented achievements, divine favour and above all, good health of mind and body. We celebrate your invaluable contributions to our nation and look forward to greater accomplishments under your distinguished leadership,” the statement concluded.
Captain Osaweren Oghenevwoke Larry
is Chairman, Urhobo Progress Union (UPU) Onisiwo Island Apapa Sub-branch
Onisiwo Kingdom, Lagos State.
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