In a telephone chat with our correspondent, the actor said he was tired of people using his name falsely on social media.
“Right now, I’m watching football in my house, but as I speak to you, some people are posting on Facebook or Twitter, using my name and picture. It’s either they are talking about politics, state of the nation, ascribing series of proverbs to me or using my name to counsel people about marriage. Someone asked me how I had time to put plenty proverbs on Facebook. I told the person I wasn’t responsible for them and that I didn’t even have a Facebook account, and she couldn’t believe it. Some people said I sat with Mourhino in one of the profile pictures and that I was telling him the gods were angry with him. Then, they posted another one that Buhari came to consult with me in my shrine.
“From time to time, you would hear or read that Pete Edochie died in London or on location. In our culture, if people wish you dead, you’d attend the person’s funeral. I’m satisfied with what life has given me. I don’t envy anybody and I don’t want to be anybody. I just want to be left alone as Pete Edochie.
“Somebody woke me up a few days ago and pointed my attention to what was written in my name about (Senator Ike) Ekweremadu. I was surprised. I don’t know him neither do I have any issue with him. Again, few days ago, it was also posted that Federal Government needed me for something. All the nonsense people write about me, I’m not happy about it.
“I’m not a politician, and I am not the only actor in this country. Throughout the campaign during the last general election, I didn’t campaign for anybody, yet on the social media you see people using my name to express support for one candidate or the other.”
Edochie said what has saved him in all these is his command of English and his intelligence.
“I speak very good English, and those posting those things in my name write in the way I can never write. That is the saving grace. Just recently, someone informed me that he saw somewhere in my name that I wrote on one of these platforms that people should come and pay N50,000, as according to them, I was organising a programme. What programme?”
Edochie said he chose to keep quiet in order not to allow the false stories to continue.
“If you begin to reply to all of that false information about you, you will make it a habit, and so anytime you don’t issue a disclaimer on a particular post, they assume you are the one speaking.
“Somebody told me he saw in the newspaper that my wife supported me when I started acting and that I divorced her when I started making money and I started running after a girl whom they said I bought a car for. In the post, they even put the number plate of the car, and that happened to be my wife’s car.
“During the Valentine’s Day, I was in my house, but they wrote on the social media that I was in Lagos. They said they wanted to interview me, they knocked on the door but l was busy inside. Again, there was a time a boy from Kenya wrote on Facebook that I was his father. How is that possible? The boy did not even say where I met his mother.
“There was a day I was sitting in my house and I started receiving messages of sympathy, that they heard my son had an accident and died while on set. I just took my phone and called him, and he told me he was on location, shooting a movie. He came to my house when he finished, whereas people had spread wrong information around.”