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Gov. Lamido was Never
Stoned in Hadejia-By
Umar Kyari
Wed Feb 16,2011
Newsdiaryonline
The attention of
Government House, Dutse, has been drawn to the front page story
of one or two newspapers suggesting that the convoy of Alhaji
Sule Lamido, the
Jigawa
State governor was stoned
when he visited Hadejia Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
for the very important annual festival of Sallar Gani. According
to the story, angry youth booed and rained stones on the
governor and a team of aides and well armed mobile men led the
governor out of Hadejia town. Still according to the story, “as
the convoy made its way out of the town, a security agent stood
at each of the four doors of Lamido’s jeep to ward off the
stones being hauled at the vehicles”.
It is, indeed,
unfortunate that any journalist will choose to advertise his
primitivity this way. Security details standing at each of the
doors of the Staff Car of all public officials entitled to grade
A protection is such a security routine that we must pity anyone
who makes any other sense out of it. Secondly, the distance
between Makwalla Quarters where the governor alighted from his
car and trekked to the palace of the Emir of Hadejia is
something that can easily be confirmed. It is almost a Kilometre.
If the youths were so angry and were booing and stoning the
governor, how come he was able to trek this distance?
Thirdly, is it
possible, by the configuration of the security back up of a
governor’s convoy in Nigeria today, that there can be such a
sustained attack on the governor without a clash between the
police and the attackers? While the possibility of somebody
throwing a stone or using catapult in such a huge crowd cannot
be ruled out, does that say anything about the governor being
the target?
When the World is
opportuned to watch the video of the entire visit, it would come
to the conclusion that whoever ever imagined such a contextually
absurd story must be the very anti-thesis of journalism. But of
course, there are journalists who are still dreaming of the
practices of yesterday in the state in terms of being called to
be settled with a plot of land or a car or a sponsored trip to
Dubai. Those sorts of practices are gone
for ever and ever in Jigawa. Those who have difficulty coming to
terms with this reality are free to imagine that Sule Lamido has
become so unpopular or has lost out in Jigawa.
It is very interesting
how one of the papers which carried this story gave itself up in
terms of the whole motif behind the story where it said, “there
has been some tension in the state since last month’s PDP
presidential primaries, when the governor and most of the state
delegates voted for President Goodluck Jonathan against the
Northern consensus candidate, former Vice President Atiku
Abubakar”. They couldn’t even hide the motif. What a pity?
Mallam Umar
Kyari is the Special Assistant on Media Affairs to HE
Government House, Dutse
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