FG to media: Don’t glorify Nigeria’s destroyers as new saviours

Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has challenged the media to contextualise their reporting “so that those who destroyed Nigeria will not be made to look like the country’s new saviours.”

The minister said this when the Chief Executive Officer of TVC Communications, Andrew Hanlon, led a team of top officials of the company on a courtesy visit to him in Abuja yesterday. “We are on a rescue mission. However, the way a section of the media is reporting the challenges facing the country today, does not reflect that understanding.

They are making a corrective administration to look like the culprit, to give the impression that the rain started beating us in Nigeria only from May 29, 2015, to play down the challenges that this administration has faced and which it is successfully tackling.

“For example, we did not get to where we are today in just three years. It has taken successive decades of bad governance, unbridled corruption, lack of probity, a culture of impunity and a near state of anarchy,” the minister’s special assistant, Segun Adeyemi, quoted him as saying in a statement yesterday.

“These are the ills this administration inherited and which it has set out to tackle. And this is what the media must reflect in their reporting.” Mohammed said “but for the prudence, probity and anti-corruption stance of this administration, the situation could have been worse. Instead of recession, we could have had a total collapse of the economy. The power grid could have collapsed altogether. Corruption could have overwhelmed the society. Boko Haram could have turned Abuja to Bama or Konduga.

Food imports could have tripled what it was pre-May 29, 2015, and the Naira might have been the worst hit.” He, therefore, challenged the media to do more to educate Nigerians, adding that “that it is hard to build but easy to destroy, that the same people who presided over yesterday’s looting of our treasury are today posing as would-be saviours of Nigerians, that this administration is re-building almost from the scratch with 60 percent less revenue, that the corrupt ones are spending millions of Naira to paint the government of the bad, and that Nigeria is not returning to Egypt.”

The minister recalled that “when the administration assumed office, the price of oil, the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy, had dropped to around $30 from over $100, foreign reserves stood at a low of $24 billion, the federal government was borrowing to pay salary, some 27 states owed arrears of salary, contractors were being owed over several years, infrastructure was in poor state, power generation was 2,690 megawatts, billions were being paid as ‘fuel subsidies’ to fat cats, corruption had emptied the treasury while 20 of the 27 local councils in Borno state were under Boko Haram control.

“Today, the trend is being reversed and the results are showing: Foreign Reserves is now $42.8 billion, infl ation has fallen for 12 consecutive months to 15.13%, N108 billion has been saved from the removal of maintenance fees payable to banks pre-TSA, the nation is saving N24.7 billion monthly with the full TSA implementation, the elimination of ghost workers has saved the nation N120 billion, capital inflow reached$1.8 billion in the second quarter of 2017, almost double the $908 million in the first quarter, while Nigeria’s stock market is one of the bestperforming in the world, delivering returns in excess of 40 per cent.” Describing a free press as indispensable to democracy, the minister assured that the administration will not do anything to stifle the press.

Earlier, Mr. Hanlon had assured the minister of TVC Communication’s commitment to the country’s audio-visual landscape, while announcing that a new radio station “will open in Abuja in April as part of the company’s aggressive investment programme.”

Also, on the entourage of the TVC Communications CEO were Ronan Redmond, TVC’s Director of Commercial; Babatunde Kolade Otitoju, Head of News and Taiwo Amodu, the Abuja Bureau Chief.

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