Our attention has been drawn to a publication in the Blueprint newspaper of February 19, 2019, which is clearly a political hatchet job written by one Joshua Egbodo, the correspondent of the paper covering the House of Representatives.
Ordinarily, we would not have bothered to react to such rubbish because the same claims made in the last three years by Dogara have been severally addressed. However, since not every reader is familiar with Bauchi politics, there’s need for this clarification, especially on the claims by Egbodo that Dogara has “a firm grip of his constituency’s political structures, at least ahead of Governor Abubakar.”
The truth is that if this claim is true, Muhammadu Buhari and M. A. Abubakar would have won the 2015 elections in Bogoro, they never did, only Dogara won on the platform of APC. In any case, Gov Abubakar became governor with over 300, 000 votes and Dogara’s constituency gave only 80,000 without which Gov Abubakar would still have won. Even in the recent senatorial byelection, only Bogoro, where Dogara comes from, voted for the PDP. How then does that amount to “firm grip” if only one out of his three local governments voted for PDP? With that trend, one waits to see how Dogara will return to the House since only his local goverment area votes against APC.
It is obvious that the writer is on a political errand otherwise how can he explain the fact that he didn’t see the need for balancing his write up. That is the least that any journalist is expected to do in this regard. People like Egbodo shouldn’t be allowed to go near journalism because their conduct gives our respected profession a bad name.
For Dogara, we advice him to focus on his constituency and stop assuming that he will deceive his constituents whom he abandoned after gaining national prominence only to return now with attacks on Gov Abubakar as his selling point, after all the governor is not a member of Dass/Tafawa Balewa/Bogoro federal constituency.
Abubakar Al-Sadique,
Press Secretary to Gov M. A. Abubakar.
