Ambassador Onoh is seeking damages and costs from the defendants.
By Jeffrey Agbo
Former Nigerian Ambassador to Namibia and Head of Mission in Jamaica, Ms. Lilian Onoh, has sued the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, for defamation in a court in Texas, US.
Also listed in the suit is Omoyele Sowore, publisher of Sahara Reporters; and Gabriel Aduda, former Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but who is now in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources.
According to court documents obtained by TheNiche, the suit was filed by Ms. Onoh’s lawyer, Steven Thornton, on December 22 in the US District Court of the Northern District of Texas.
The filing alleges that the trio, through Sahara Reporters, defamed Ambassador Onoh to discredit her exposure of corruption in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where Mr. Onyeama was Minister from 2015 to 2023.
Included in the alleged corrupt acts that Onyeama and Aduda were accused of trying to cover up are the embezzlement of $2.8 million of Red Cross funds for Haiti Earthquake victims by the ambassador’s predecessor in Jamaica, as well as visa fraud against the USA and other countries by her successor in Jamaica.
The defamation concerns a report published on April 21, 2023, by Sowore’s Sahara Reporters alleging that Ambassador Onoh was indicted and asked to refund N50 million and was also sacked for “misappropriating N50 million” – something the suit contends was totally false.
“The article then claims that the Nigerian Federal Civil Service Commission fired Ms. Onoh in 2021. Sahara Reporters next claimed that a ‘report by a seven-man committee indicted the controversial former Nigerian High Commissioner to Namibia over her alleged financial misappropriation while serving in the Southern African country,” the court documents read.
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According to the suit, “Ambassador Onoh was never terminated from any posting with the Nigerian Government for misappropriation and no one on behalf of the Nigerian Government contended that misappropriation of funds was the cause of the termination.”
Going further, it stated that the actions of Onyeama, Aduda, Sowore and Sahara Reporters were “extreme and outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilised community.”
Ambassador Onoh is seeking damages and costs from the defendants.
The case has been assigned to Judge Jane Boyle for adjudication but no date has been fixed for hearing.
