David Hundeyin’s ordeal at the Harare airport in Zimbabwe was due to his attempt to enter the country on questionable refugee travel documents and without a visa, officials have confirmed.
The blogger, recently axed from Oxford University over sexism and an unsanctioned commercial deal with a fake professor, was detained for several hours by airport security in the Southern African country on Wednesday night.
He was nabbed after checks revealed that he had no visa to enter the country and his passport, issued by Ghana where he is seeking refuge from feared lawsuits in Nigeria over defamatory reports, raised questions about his identity.
“David is an asylum seeker from Nigeria travelling on Ghanaian refuge papers. In our laws one travelling on such papers needs to ger a visa before traveling. You can’t get the visa at the port of entry as there are way too many verifications that are needed.”
“He was denied entry on those grounds as well as failing to satisfy other inquiries by the officers. He was detrained and made to wait for a flight out which was booked by Zimbabwean authorities,” Nick Mangwana, a Ministry of Information official confirmed in a series of tweets published earlier today.
Although Hundeyin has regained his freedom and has been flown out of the country, many consider the incident as proof of the blogger’s scant regard for law and due process. It is his latest brush with the law over issues related to his identity, with others based on his so-called “investigative reports”.
He has faced accusations of cherry-picking information and using his blog as a personal vendetta tool to settle scores with perceived enemies. He is known to sensationalize benign events while presenting fabricated accounts as tips from sources in overly-dramatic reports written to attack and smear targeted entities.
Officials of Oxford University, after carrying out a check into Hundeyin before reaching the decision to terminate his bogus fellowship, denounced him as a “disreputable figure” and the university’s campus newspaper, Cherwell, described details of lurid and sexist comments Hundeyin made at a fraudulent book launch he hosted with support from a man recently disgraced for parading himself as a professor.