Senator Andy Uba has come out to deny claims that he owes a bank, stating that a recent viral video purportedly showing picketers from Heritage Bank (HB) at a place claimed to be his home is a hoax.
Senator Uba is among the contestants cleared by the All Progressives Congress (APC) for the Anambra State governorship election in November.
Read Also: VIDEO: Heritage Bank Staff Storm Senator Andy Uba’s House in Abuja, Ask Him To Repay Loan
Speaking through a statement from the Andy Uba Campaign Council (AUCC) signed by Chief Paul Chukwuma, DG of the council, the senator said that his name did not even appear on the most recent AMCON debtor list that has been published since 2018, Daily Independent reports.
Going to the video proper, AUCC picked holes in the footage, saying it all pointed to lack of authenticity in the film.
In the said video that has since been trending since Monday, a group of protesters, clutching placards, are seen at the gate of a house described by the narrator in the clip as the home of Distinguished Senator Andy Uba.
According to the narrator, again, the protesters are staff of HB Abuja, ostensibly at the home of Sen Uba to have a discussion with him over loans he took from the bank and had not repaid.
The narrator claimed that the workers could lose their jobs if the debt was not paid by the senator.
“However, a careful study of the video and content of the narration easily exposes the lie that the entire video exercise is all about,” AUCC pointed out.
The council noted that, though the protesters are clad in customised t-shirts of black and green with white patches, the cameraman carefully kept a distance so that captions on the t-shirts could not be read.
“So one cannot really tell what the gathering is all about. Even so, getting such uniforms at a short notice to picket a loan defaulter by workers in a bank seem a little far-fetched. Even so, whatever slogans are written on the cardboard placards held by the said staff are out of focus,” AUCC noted again in its statement.
“A minimally experienced cameraman would have focused on the slogans on the placards to pass the message. The body language of the so-called protesters doesn’t even show the seriousness of the claim that their jobs depended on the man they said to have come to picket at the house. If anything, these could just be some small campaign groups meeting at a rendezvous point to take instructions, as it were,” the statement added.
AUCC asked why the house itself, said to be Sen Uba’s, was out of focus by the camera.
“The answer is quite simple: showing the entire house would have exposed the video as the fraud that it is. Andy Uba’s house in Abuja is a well known landmark in a highly exclusive area of Abuja where commercial tricycles that we see plying the road in the video are off-limit.
“Going by the claims of the narrator in the video, since when do workers go about picketing customers who took loans in banks in Nigeria,” AUCC asked.
The campaign council further stated that Sen Uba did not owe any bank.
“There is no truth in the said claim that Andy Uba owes any money to HB or any bank. We wish to state that Senator Andy Uba (MFR), has no trace nor record of debt on his profile,” AUCC said.