The Imo State Government on Wednesday explained why it shut down Fancy Hotel, located in the Umuguma area of Owerri, the state capital.

“The hotel was shut by the Task Force working with the committee on Covid-19 for failing to comply with directives on the coronavirus as it concerns the state,” Ogwuike Nwachuku, Chief Press Secretary to Governor Hope Uzodinma, said while responding to enquiries by News Express.

“Unfortunately it happens that the owner of the hotel suspected to have returned from a country with high risk coronavirus attack had visited the place earlier. The Task Force had to move in to do the needful. As we speak Imo State has no single record of the coronavirus,” Nwachuku further said.

News Express had this morning broken the news of the closure of the hotel and unmasked the owner, Christogonus Aguwa Osuagwu, as the unnamed second Nigerian to die of Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the country.

Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Enahire, had announced the death on Monday at a press briefing in Abuja, disclosing that the death occurred last weekend but refused to disclose the identity of the victim.


News Express reported that Fancy Hotel “has been shut down . . . by the Imo State Government while all the guests quarantined.”

It added that Osuagwu’s “immediate family whom he visited in Ahiazu Mbaise as soon as he came back from Europe have also been quarantined.”

The first person to die of COVID-19 in Nigeria was Engr. Suleiman Achimugu, a former Managing Director of the Products and Pipelines Marketing Company (PPMC).

The economic meltdown will be equally as bad if not worse than the pandemic itself.