Nigerian government threatens to sue Daily Trust over the Samoa Agreement
The Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN) will receive a complaint from the federal government against Daily Trust Newspapers for publishing information on the Samoa agreement.
This clue was provided on Saturday in Abuja by Mohammed Idris, Minister of Information and National Orientation, who also stated that the
government would file a lawsuit over the article, which he called “fake and mischievous.”
According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the minister of information addressed a press conference in
response to a story that was deemed to have the potential to incite social unrest and religious strife in the nation.
Additionally, according to NAN, Mr. Idris and Atiku Bagudu, his counterpart in budget and planning, spoke to the media.
support the rights of those who identify as LGBTI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex).
Additionally, it stated that Nigeria would receive $150 billion for signing the agreement.
Signed on June 28 at the Organization of Africa, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) Secretariat in Brussels, Belgium, the pact is commonly known as the Samoa accord.
According to the agreement’s details, members of OACPCS and the European Union, along with their respective member states, are partners in this cooperation.
The agreement was signed on November 15, 2018, by 47 of the 79 OACPS nations and all 27 EU member states. Negotiations on the pact started in 2018.
The African Regional Protocol on the subject is divided into two sections: the framework for collaboration and the fields of
cooperation, which cover, among other things, the preservation of human rights, the environment, and inclusive and sustainable economic growth.
The minister referred to the medium’s report on the subject as blatantly untrue.
He stated that since the Bola Tinubu administration took office, Daily Trust has grown accustomed to this trend.
As an ardent democrat, Mr. Tinubu noted that he had remained in excellent standing with the media, but he expressed dismay at “some elements abusing this free environment guaranteed by the government.”
“We are concerned about the amount of careless reporting and remarks that some media outlets and people have made that compromise national security and stability.
Although we occasionally consider and handle those sporadic reports as a normal aspect of the media’s job, we have recently seen a pattern that is hard to brush off as typical journalism.
“The pernicious and provocative articles that has been publishing lately seem to be nothing more than a concerted attempt to paint the government in a negative light.
“We have repeatedly forced ourselves to believe otherwise, but the persistent mischievous publications left us with little choice but to accept this as true.
“Daily Trust promoted a skewed narrative that the Federal Government was pushing the nation into a war and twisted it with regional sentiment to foment disaffection in the wake of the coup in the Niger Republic.
The same newspaper ran a headline that falsely claimed the administration was planning to establish foreign military outposts in the nation.
“Daily Trust and the people who first made that wild accusation did not offer any proof at all.
After that, a falsehood that the Federal Government had renamed the Murtala Mohammed Expressway in Abuja as Wole Soyinka Way was created and spread by Daily Trust hardly two weeks ago.
The newspaper relied solely on hearsay and lies in each of the cases. They also shown no humility or regret for their actions.
But we never imagined that Daily Trust and its supporters would act so recklessly as to try to blow up the nation by
fabricating accusations that the government has signed an agreement to support the LGBTQI community.
The allegation is not there in the signed agreement, which is why we deemed it vile and nasty.
Surprisingly, the article offered neither the purportedly signed agreement nor any supporting documentation for its claims.
He said, “Unfortunately, some of our esteemed imams used the sensational and baseless story as the basis for khutba (sermons), misled by the story, which inflamed tempers.”
But he said that the government will not resort to harsh measures or self-help, preferring to stay on the sidelines of decency.
“We are, however, treading the path of civility and the rule of law, while past governments clamped down on the media for infractions much lower than this,” the speaker declared.
The minister declared that “on this irresponsible reporting,” the federal government would bring the issue to the NPAN Ombudsman.
