Official Website of Governor Chimaroke Nnamani

Overwhelmed by the incredible turnout at the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) flag off in Enugu last Friday, Governor Chimaroke Nnamani of Enugu State has affirmed the strength and spread of his party’s influence in the State, arguing further that such was a clear indication that the media tantrum of political opposition was mere pretensions without any influence on the people whatsoever.

Reviewing the Flag Off rally in which the governor presented the governorship flag bearer, Sullivan Chime, his deputy gubernatorial candidate, Chief Sam Ejiofor as well as candidates for National Assembly seats in the State, Nnamani declared that even against the background of persistent attacks in the media, Enugu State PDP had proven to be the master of the State and would go ahead to show that the departing government of PDP had lived up to its contract with the people, especially in terms of providing democracy dividends across the board.

Admonishing PDP men and women never to be bothered by what he described as “infantile media war meant to attract unearned attention or alter the political landscape,” Nnamani said that even though his government was a veteran of press wars - having fought and triumphed in many press wars launched against his administration in the last seven and half years – his government and the PDP, rather than consume quality time and resources at contending with worthless media attacks, would continue to pursue loftier programmes for the benefit of the greater number of the people.

According to the Governor, even though the opposition in the state had caused so much uproar through its unrelenting attacks and countless petitions against the government and its officials, “the testimony of the huge success of the Friday Rally is the strong signal to ‘these’ busy side-street-politicians that they do not have any foothold.”

Speaking further through his Special Adviser on Media Matters, Mr. Festus Adedayo, Governor Nnamani said: “0nce more, within a short time, we had to react to a spate of propaganda against the person of the governor and officials of Enugu State Government, which finds a fecund ground to germinate in the press; and to say that the propaganda can never deter us from the path of governmental lofty ideals which government is pursuing.”

According to Adedayo, the Governor likened the opposition in the State to a drowning crowd trying to clutch at straw, who, though unfortunately, easily found professionals of the pen and tube as willing allies in purveying their “obviously hate-laced concoctions” through the media.

Nnamani, according to Adedayo, therefore, wondered why an otherwise very critical Nigerian press, “which had established an age-long reputation for sieving out wheat from chaffs”, which is also very conscious of its history and rich in volumes of battles against falsehood, should so suddenly turn allies to and conduits for persons who were clearly out to impose their selfish views on others.

He said that even though the government had belaboured itself to answer every accusation against it and the governor, the arrowheads of the opposition still daily “take delivery of new consignments of improvised tar and coal with which they go to town to tarnish and rubbish the image of the governor.”

Mr. Adedayo said that the main reason for the relentless pursuits of the opposition was obvious to the Enugu State government, which he said was to abort the Senatorial candidature of the governor, an intention which he maintained was bound to fail.

He wondered why the opposition, which claimed that it had garnered an unprecedented strength among the people of the state, would strenuously shy away from a fight with the Ebeano political family at the polls, if it was confident that its vicious propaganda held water with the ordinary people of the state.

He attributed the unrelenting attacks against his person to what he termed “the shortness of human memory,” stating that it was only this that could make people he called “revanchists” to seek to deny the fact that the Nnamani government was one of the most hardworking of its kind in recent years.

“ Luckily for us, those huge projects, on account of which we had received countless thumbs-up from diverse number of people; from the 14 EU Ambassadors, the presidency, the PDP, bench-marking exercise and even the Senate President, have not disappeared. They are still on the soil of Enugu . Anyone looking for Enugu money would find it buried on the soil of those projects. We couldn’t have achieved all these in an atmosphere of perversity and adverse corruption, the type that the opposition go to town with,” he said.

He said that the projects, which include the first underground tunnel in the country, an International Conference Centre, an 18-court room judicial headquarters, a multi-structured Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT) Teaching Hospital, a multi-structured, 296-ESUT permanent campus, 326-flat Loma Linda Estate and countless others, were reasons why the opposition would sound hollow in their accusations against Nnamani, for years to come.

While denouncing the opposition’s propaganda, “using the press as its Man Friday”, he urged practitioners to be conscious of “the hallowed history of the Nigerian press” which, he said, was a stretch of glory that should be jealously guarded, which, if perverted, could be destroyed, as in the recent practice of turning a glorious profession into “a fertile ground for lies and rumours.”

The governor enjoined media houses to always cross-check their facts before publishing, stating that the state government was likely to be forced to abandon its “time-tested policy of not suing media houses for libel” if “the persistent infiltration of the press by wolves in pen’s clothing” was not checked.

He said that as it had always done in the last few years, the opposition, desperate to paint a picture of governmental sleaze, had embarked on a series of campaigns of calumny, cautioning that government would hardly, any further, stand by and watch its hard-earned reputation dragged down the mud by “a combination of desperate opposition and willing press hands”.