By Viashima Sylvanus, Jalingo
Following several weeks of total blackout in most parts of the North East region, a veteran Journalist Mr Sully Abu on Thursday said Government’s inability to fix the situation expediently is not only very annoying but embarrassing to the nation.
Abu made the remarks while welcoming journalist across selected northern states to Gombe State for a Two Day workshop on Audit Reporting Training, X-raying State Government audit reports.
He noted that Nigeria is regrettably on a wrong trajectory in so many ways and the journalists must be able to wake up to their responsibilities by holding leaders accountable and drawing public attention to issues as they affect the people.
“I feel so angry that for over a month, most parts of the North East has been in total darkness because of some vandalization of power infrastructure. This does not only happen here. Public infrastructure suffer vandalization all over the world. That does not warrant such neglect of the people. The government must a machinery in place to ensure that these things are fixed quickly.
“People must be held accountable when things like this happen. That is your role as journalists. Why do we have a Minister of power sitting very comfortable when Millions of people are in total darkness because the government has failed in it’s responsibilities?
“We must wake up and hold governments at all levels to account. That is where training and retraining comes to play and that is the challenge some of us have taken to create a platform for us to improve our capabilities and capacity. This training is one of such opportunities, this time, focusing on reporting State Government audit reports”.
Our Correspondent reports that the training is organized by the FrontFoot Media Initiative under the auspices of Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism with funding from Macarthur Foundation.