Kyari, Oyo-Ita not summoned over feud on leaked report, says Presidency

The Presidency on Friday denied the reports claiming that President Muhammadu Buhari summoned the Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari and Head Of Service of the Federation, Winifred Oyo-Ita over alleged hot argument at the pre-meeting of the Federal Executive Council meeting on Wednesday.

Reports had it that there was hot argument  between the two top officials over who leaked Oyo-Ita’s report to the President on the illegal reinstatement of the former chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Pension Reforms, Abdulrasheed Maina.

The Senior Special Assistant on Media and publicity, Malam Shehu, in a statement, denied “any suggestion that the two government officials had been summoned to see the President over the alleged skirmish”, referring to that conclusion as yet another example of conjecture.

“Top government officials of that calibre see the President on a regular basis. To suggest that they were summoned to see him as a result of a so-called feud is just a fabrication, a conclusion that is below the level of responsible journalism that we expect from our State House correspondents,” he said.

He added “A call has gone out for a higher sense of responsibility among journalists in Nigeria, especially those assigned to the State House, who are supposed to be the cream of the crop.”

He described newspaper reports of a fight between top government officials at the State House as fabrications that could only have been conjured by correspondents who would probably make better fiction writers than journalists.

“By tradition, the media organizations send their best reporters to the State House. This should reflect, at all times on the quality of reporting.

“I am a journalist myself, and in journalism, you are not supposed to report anything other than the facts of what you heard or observed directly, or what you were told by a firsthand or authoritative eyewitness,” he said. “You cannot add two and two to make twenty-two and present it to the public as news.”

Malam Shehu insisted that it was impossible for the conversation between the President’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, and the Head of Service of the Federation Mrs Oyo Ita to have been heard by any journalist, as the distance between the State House correspondents and the two government officials as they addressed the Vice President at Wednesday’s FEC meeting, would have made their conversation completely inaudible to the journalists.

“People can debate and argue over issues, but to suggest that there was a feud, a fight or a clash was to take matters beyond what they were,” the SSA media said.

The post Kyari, Oyo-Ita not summoned over feud on leaked report, says Presidency appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.