Uyo, the ever-busy Akwa Ibom State capital was made even busier on Tuesday,[b] August 26, 2008 when the entire town was awash with a story that an illegal couple–a married woman and her boyfriend who were having sex in an uncompleted storey building were unable to disentangle after the act.

The couple said to have been found about nine o’clock in the morning by the workers in the uncompleted building were said to have been permanently hooked to each other since the previous evening when the married woman sneaked into the building to have a quickie before rushing back home to her influential husband.[/b]The story also had it that the husband, said to be a permanent secretary in one of the ministries in the state, had since suspected his wife to be a serial adulterer and had thus decided to lace her with the dreaded ekpo nka owo juju, the version that the Yoruba call magun.
As at when Daily Sun learnt of the incident by 3.30 pm and rushed to the scene which is between 111 and 113 Abak Road, the place had been taken over by okada riders, motorists and pedestrians all coming to see the hooked couple.

Daily Sun learnt that the police had on several occasions come to dispel the surging crowd which had taken over the building. Some young men even mounted sentry and collected N50 from each person who wanted to go in and see the show live. Daily Sun had to pay and rush in to take photographs before the twosome could suddenly disentangle to kill a possible front-page lead.


Surprisingly, there was no couple inside the two-storey building. Our correspondent searched every room pointing camera like American soldiers guns searching for Sadam Hussien with machine guns, yet no love-making couple was in sight.

It was only after Daily Sun had struggled to get out of the choking building and asked those doing business around the place that it was revealed that the whole drama was a hoax.
A lady who preferred anonymity but who works at Ablaze Pharmaceutical and Distribution Limited, 113 Abak Road, told Daily Sun that the whole drama was scripted and acted by okada riders for the public to go crazy.

The True Story
The lady however said that that morning, the security man at the uncompleted building was accosted by a lady who accused him of putting her in the family way. “She started dragging the man but he took her inside the building to leave the crowd which had started gathering. “We never knew how the story of man and woman who could not disentangle came about. But it is the product of okadamen,” she explained.

Another man selling motorcycles on the same premises confirmed what the lady said and wondered “why people would leave they business to waste their time on false rumours.”

Hard Sell
But the true story was very unpalatable to thousands of pilgrims who had turned the building into a big tourist attraction. Even those who had entered the house and come out, still behaved like the “good men” of the Ali and the Angel story. “Chei! I have never seen such a thing in my life. See a married woman disgracing herself, her family, and her husband. She is even a deaconess on one church there,” a young man who came down from the building about 10 minutes after Daily Sun had done a painstaking search, exclaimed.

With such exclamation, others who had wanted to listen to the true story rushed and paid the gate money and went upstairs only to come down garnishing the rumour with different species of spices to make the crowd go wild with ecstasy.

The South South bureau chief of Champion Newspapers, Tony Etim, even called from Port Harcourt same day to confirm the story from Daily Sun. He was shocked when told that it was just a hoax. How news flies!

[b]To make the story even richer, the rumour mongers later in the evening said the police had carried the fornicators (or is it adulterers?) away to the hospital. But which hospital? Nobody could tell. Some said the police had arrested them and were at the state police headquarters at Ikot Akpan Abia.[/b]But the police public relations officer, Akwa Ibom State command, Mr Gabriel Ngban, said there was nothing like that. “I heard the story just like that. But there was nothing like that. We never arrested anybody. Don’t mind them.”