Between Lawyer Emeka Ugwuonye and lady accusing him of releasing her HIV Status

A lady identified as Ogechi Stella Njoku, has taken to Facebook to call out human rights activist and Lawyer, Emeka Ugwuonye for reportedly sharing her HIV status on social media, after they had issues because of money. She wrote;

“MY ENCOUNTER WITH EMEKA EPHRAIM UGWUONYE

I owe this explanation to people who may fall prey to the antics of Emeka Ugwuonye of the Due Process Advocate, an online group run on Facebook platform.

Mr. Emeka Ugwuonye portrays himself as a voice to the voiceless, fighting for the susceptible, the browbeaten and also fighting against societal and human menace perpetrated in the land, these claims caught his followers including me. We did believe in him and his visions, little did we know that he was an imminent doom waiting to explode against anyone who dares to counter his modus of operandi when necessary and where needed. He traded like a demi –god and would go to any length to blackmail, smear, threaten and slut shame anyone who questions his activities or had a contra views to his activities, hence, i made bold to say that he is evil personified.

I got to know Emeka Ugwonye and his group the Due Process Advocates sometime last year, when the news of Mrs Chacha disappearance broke out. With keen interest i followed his series of update on Madam Chacha, on the claims that he was fighting to bring to justice whatever that had gone wrong, hence i decided to become his ardent follower and registered with his group.

Prior to becoming his group member, I had a boyfriend whom I failed to carried out an outstanding assiduousness on his personality, life style and status despite the fact that we both resides and work in Abuja. Our intimacy grew, and our relationship metamorphosed into deeper realm of affairs, it became pertinent to run some health test when i fell sick which series of lab test were carried out on me, including HIV test, and it was proven that i was positive. I handed over my lab result to my supposed boyfriend because i couldn’t hid the truth from him, he welcomed it with an open heart, then i forced him to go for test, which he refused initially, but after some series of persuasion from me, he yielded to go with me for a HIV test, yet after the test, he refused to show me his result, rather verbally told me that he was negative, yet to my bewilderment, he was taking my ARV with me. While all these were going on, i didn’t know and never knew that the man was married with kids and were also dating my best friend cum a sister, we were both too busy to have carried out a forensic audit on his person, we took everything he told us hook line and sinker without any iota of doubt.

Like the saying goes, nothing is hidden under the sun, things began to unfold, my best friend engaged me in a discussion and we were discussing on general life, when we both learnt that we were dating the same guy, so we decided to carry out more findings on him, that was when we realized that he was married with kids and that even the name he projected to me as the name of his sister and used the name to collect money from me was his wife who lives in Lagos while he was on posting to Abuja. We found out that where he claimed to be working was not where he works, everything he had projected to us were proven to be false, hence we both quit our relationship with him. So, i started demanding for my brand new HP laptop which i gave to him, because he did not want to return my laptop, he resorted to blackmail, he started blackmailing me with my HIV result and were making demands of money from me, when i couldn’t bear it again, i confided in Mr. Emeka Ugwuonye who claimed to be a lawyer fighting for injustice, he assured me that i would get justice, and as it is in his custom and tradition of DPA that whenever anyone approaches him with a story or problem, he would post it on the group page but will not disclose the identity of the person involved, so I obliged him, he took the case up and sought to publish it with an assurance that my identity would be hidden, which i gave my consent, and it was done so, and my laptop recovered from the man and further blackmailed were stopped.

Considering the effort and the role he played in my case, I became too committed with the activities of the group, supported the group both with cash and social responsibilities, till around February this year, when one of his group admin contacted me to join a facebook messenger called DPA powerhouse where critical decision on how to move forward the activities of DPA were discussed and solutions proffered, I did not hesitate to join because it is in favour of DPA and Emeka Ugwuonye was a member of that mini group.

Everything was moving on well and a deliberations on how to foster the visions of DPA were extensively discussed, it was unanimously agreed that we should carry out awareness campaign on Rape, Domestic Violence and other vices that have eaten up into the society, hence, fund was needed and we decided to make willingly donations to achieve these aims. We did raise the funds via individual contributions.

I strongly believe that Emeka Ugwuonye least or underestimated the amount we could contribute, therefore when he found out how much we had been able to raise, he became interested in the money undermining the purpose for which the money was contributed. He demanded that the money be paid into his personal account as the founder of the group, that the money was raised on behalf of his group, I objected his motions and were strongly supported by every member of the mini group, therefore things fell apart.

Furtherance to my objections to his motives, Mr. Ugwuonye declared every member of that mini group an anti-DPA, hence blocked us and peddled lies against us, again he took it extra far by publishing my health status which he had in confidence to the world via social media just to slut shame me. A man who claims to uphold justice became a breaker of justice, he became the devil. He breached professional ethics of confidentiality of client and inflicting pains which is capable of leading to suicide, Mr. Ugwuonye broke HIV anti-Disclosure law, He broke client confidentiality and he broke ethics of profession.

It might interest the general public to note that Mr. Emeka Ugwuonye have been collecting a registration fees of N6,000 from over 250,000 members of his group claiming that he runs the group as an NGO, yet for over four years of existence, he had failed to register the DPA as an entity under the Company’s law (CAMA). He has refused to be accountable for donations made to his personal accounts which i also did, he fails to represents those who he sworn to protect rather he hurts them and slut shame them. Emeka is not whom he projects himself to be, whosoever that keep on trusting him after reading my ordeals with him and also other victims ordeals does that at their own peril.

I beseech the general public to hold Emeka accountable for his evil deeds; Emeka has done more harm than good.

God bless every woman who stood by me, God bless every man who stood by me, God bless my real friends who never let me down, and they took the bullet shot by Emeka on my behalf.
I appreciate you all.”

Emeka Ugwuonye who replied the lady wrote;

“ABOUT THE LADY THAT SAYS I DISCLOSED HER HIV STATUS:

A friend of mine, based in Canada, just had a chat with me. Toward the end of the chat, he told me there was some social media story involving me and he urged me to respond to it.

I already knew what he was talking about. It is really a bizarre story of one lady who claimed that I exposed her HIV status. I tried to tell my friend that there was no need to react to that repeated falsehood. To react to it would be to give more attention to the woman and that is what she is looking for. Besides, I have previously explained that the story was false.

I did not expose her HIV status. I would not do such a thing, and there are many reasons not to do so. The first reason is that I actually do not view HIV-positives negatively. I am very well informed about HIV and I actually see it as not being any different from diabetes. I don’t view a carrier as such a big deal. You have to believe in something before you can use such a thing. I do not believe that an HIV-positive is worse off than any other people in the society, especially someone that has admitted she has it and is receiving treatment. So, I would not have seen being a HIV positive as a weapon to use against a person. That is if I were minded to hurt this person, which I was not at all.

What happened was that this lady came to DPA last year and she wanted DPA to compel her boyfriend to undergo HIV test. I asked her why, she said because the man had been having unprotected sex with her and she believed he was also HIV positive. I asked her since she was not afraid of being infected since she was positive herself, what was the need in trying to establish his own status. She explained to me that the man was married and the man was dating her friend, and that it was necessary to warn those two women about the man’s status.

That was a bizarre story. I would not have pursued it. But there were other issues between her and the man. The man seized her computers and her medical records and was distributing the information and harassing her. The man was publicly accusing her of deliberately infecting men in Abuja. This lady presented to me a very patent story of abuse in the hands of that man.

I clearly informed her that what she was asking me to do might expose her status, because I thought she wanted to keep it hidden. But this women (in writing, which I have) told me that she had actually made it public and that she did not mind her status being disclosed in the effort to stop Adesina (her boyfriend) from harassing her.

That was how we in DPA commenced work on her case and we made the case public in 2016. The woman was happy with our work. She praised us. She commended us. So, any idea that I made her status public is false. She made it public. She posted her stories everywhere.

It was at the end of the case between her and her boyfriend that I finally understood her motive. She knew all along that her boyfriend was married, but continued to date him. However, her boyfriend also started a relationship with her friend. She did not want her boyfriend to date any other woman. She felt that the best way to keep the man to herself was to disclose that he was HIV positive. She knew that if the man was known to be HIV positive, it would be harder for him to date other women, particularly that her friend. In an effort to disclose to the world that her boyfriend was HIV pisitive, she did not care about disclosing her owns status. It was a rather unfortunate and desperate situation for her. But we got to know that truth toward the end of the case.

It was a very public thing then. DPA insisted that the man would go for HIV test. The man actually requested DPA to send representatives to follow him for the test. He did the test and he published the result. It turned out that the man was negative. He never had unprotected sex with this woman. The only reason she falsely accused him of having unprotected sex with her was simply to tar him with her own status. So, clearly to us, this lady is a troublemaker extra-ordiannare and a liar. But we didn’t know all that till the end of her case with her boyfriend. We got back her computer from the money and we stopped the man from harassing her.

In fact, the latest mention of her case recently, which she is now hinging her false claims upon, was in July when I commended her for her courage in coming forward to disclose her status last year. Apparently, while last year she was disclosing her status, I did not know that she had changed her mind this year and wanted to hide her status.

It is always troubling when an HIV patient, who had previously disclosed her status suddenly decides to hide it. It suggests she is in a relationship with someone that does not know her status. But I didn’t know all that and I was not interested in all that.

What actually happened was that, unknown to me, this same lady had joined DPA and climbed to a position in the DPA Chapter in Abuja. After her case last year, I did not follow her case anymore. I didn’t follow her to know what she was up to. So, this year on an entirely different matter where there was misconduct on her part, she was removed from DPA. She is bitter about it and she peddles these false stories of how I disclosed her status. That is utterly false. She even claims to have had a function in DPA and all that. That was not true. She was never an Admin in DPA.

I will post the message she sent to me at the end of our work for her last year. I urge those who read her stories to discountenance them as sour grape. She is bitter that I removed her from DPA. Also, she is enjoying the little fame that comes with fighting Emeka Ugwuonye.

I really don’t think it is proper for me to spend more time on this issue. I just hope that her friends will urge her to stop infecting men with HIV, if the allegations of her ex-boyfriend, Mr. Adesina, were to be true. While nobody should stigmatize her for being HIV positive, she has a duty to avoid infecting unsuspecting men with the disease as those who know her well have alleged.

Emeka Ugwuonye.”