Tuesday 2 October 2012

Blame It On BusinessDay And The Opposition’—Presidency Reacts To ‘Lie’ In Broadcast

 


One phone call was all it took to burst the President’s bubble and puncture one of the many half-truths that littered President Jonathan’s Independence Day broadcast yesterday.
Just one phone call.
That call, carried out by an online news medium, has set the entire communications sector of the Presidency on a tailspin. President Jonathan had made wild claims concerning Nigeria’s rating on the Corruption index. That claim, copiously found in the speech the President delivered to the world yesterday, has been found to be false.
The President’s aides have come out in full defence mode, however. They blame the BusinessDay Newspaper from where they say they got their facts from. And then, the opposition came next. Reproduced below is the Press Release signed by Presidential aide, Reno Omokri and emanating from the Research, documentation and strategy unit (manned by Oronto Douglas) of the Presidency:
Our attention has been drawn to reports from some opposition leaning media houses alleging that Mr. President made some false claims about Nigeria’s standing in this year’s Transparency International anti corruption rating.
As is the practice worldwide, we accept the premise that whatever is published in the media and goes unchallenged is the truth. On this issue, the media published their synopsis of the most recent Transparency International report and BusinessDay, a well respected newspaper with a bias for business reporting in a headline on the 12th of September 2012 with the titled ‘FG’s anti-corruption initiative impacts Nigeria’s global perception’ said “The survey on global corruption perceptions for 2011 versus 2001 showed that the third best improvement in the world was in Nigeria, with its score improving by 1.5 points”.
The above quoted comments were relied upon in coming to the conclusion that Mr. President honestly came to in good faith. To this day, Transparency International has not disputed the findings of BusinessDay.
For a section of the opposition to now cast aspersions on the integrity of the President when he relied on notorious facts (anything published in the press and which remains unchallenged is a notorious fact) is proof positive of the now obvious fact that they lack ideas on how to move Nigeria forward and would rather snipe at efforts of the President to move the nation forward for which any patriot would do.
In conclusion the President acted in good faith and his statement was based on notorious facts and are evidenced by recent breakthroughs in fighting corruption in the oil industry where subsidy fraud suspects are already facing trial as well as in the Agricultural Sector where decades old corrupt practices in the fertilizer distribution network have been eradicated via the voucher system which cuts off the middle man.
Regards,
Reno

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