By Oyibo Salihu
Chairman of Olamaboro local government area of Kogi state, Faruk Adejo, has appealed to President Goodluck Jonathan to consider more intervention programmes in the local councils in the country.
He made the call yesterday in Okpo, headquarters of the council, when he received a delegation of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) who was on tour of projects executed under the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P).
He said the SURE-P intervention was one of the most laudable efforts of the federal government aimed at bringing the dividends of democracy to the people in the rural areas where critical infrastructure were lacking previously.
The chairman, who was represented by the vice-chairman, Sunday Agala, said he had been able to execute projects which had direct bearing on the lives of the people of the area.
Adejo, himself a veteran journalist, called on media practitioners in the state to be proactive, objective and constructive in the discharge of their duties, saying that their visit to councils to ascertain their developmental efforts was a welcome development.
Earlier, the chairman of NUJ, Ali Atabor, had called on public office holders to see journalists as partners in progress, even as he said no amount of blackmail would prevent them from carrying out their constitutional responsibility.
He commended the chairman for his “modest efforts” in the provision of intervention in critical areas which he said had helped to bring relief to the people.
Atabor said the tour had proved wrong some cynics who previously erroneously believed that the council chairmen had not performed well at all, adding that majority of them had actually justified their mandates.
