Samuel Ajibola: Why I sued TikTok user who questioned my son’s paternity

Samuel Ajibola, the Nigerian actor, has revealed why he took legal action against a TikTok user who questioned his son’s paternity.

In 2023, Ajibola filed a lawsuit against the TikTok user simply identified as Ifeanyi Aniekwe.

This was after Aniekwe shared a picture of Samuel, his wife, and their son with Olusegun Obasanjo, the former Nigerian president.

The TikTok user captioned the post: “Obasanjo and his secretary’s baby boy” — implying the child belongs to the former president.

The post also stirred controversy on social media, with some users claiming that his wife slept with Obasanjo.

But in a recent interview with Channels TV, the movie star said he decided to take legal action because the rumours began to “linger” for two years.

The actor, who became very popular for his role as ‘Spiff’ in the series ‘The Johnsons’, said he had to “stand up for my wife and son”.

“Well, it is no new news that Nigerians are very opinionated people and even in their opinions, a lot of those opinions come from misinformed positions. The picture that caused the stir was a picture of me and my wife with the former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo,” he said.

“Of whom I am the youth ambassador to the youth development center of the Olusegun Obasanjo presidential library. So I have a relationship with him, he is a huge mentor in my life and so from time to time, I visit him. In one of those cases, I just had my son so I took him to see him.

“Then people started saying my wife was a cheat, then moved to that he was the true father of my son which I would not deny,  my son does look like him in that picture. It is a still picture, a second, it is a moment in which my son was just waking up from sleep when we arrived and he had those eye bags.

“Those eye bags made him look like the former president and people were all out claiming that they were very sure that the former president was the through father of my son. As someone who has been in the industry for over thirty years, and I started acting as a young child actor. I have seen it all and I understand that sometimes people always talk.

“Sometimes you just need to let it go but because that issue was beginning to linger for two years. As a man who is married and responsible, I had to stand up for my wife and my son. It got to a point that I knew that I had to take legal action to make people understand that yes you may have opinions but you do not necessarily have to bring them to public light and be insensitive to whoever is at the other end of the backlash.

“If it was them in that shoe, how would they feel? But this is something I have talked about with my wife and I tell her that these are the things that come with being in the industry so we were prepared already. But we needed to use somebody as a scapegoat and that is the reason why we decided to take legal action.”

Ajibola began acting in 1995 at age 6 with the film ‘Tears for Love’. He later featured as a child actor in other films including ‘Without Love’, ‘Shame’, ‘Eye-witness, ‘Onome II’, ‘Conspiracy’, ‘Street Kids’ and ‘Day of Reckoning’.

The actor stopped featuring in ‘The Johnsons’ in 2021.