Humanrights activist, Emeka Ugwuonye, replies lady who accused him of releasing her HIV status online

A lady by the name Ogechi Stella Njoku yesterday took to her Facebook page to accuse humanright activist, Emeka Ugwuonye, of releasing her HIV status online because they had a disagreement due to money matter. Emeka has replied her now. Read what he wrote below…

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.


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