The Enugu State government has dismissed recent media reports alleging that Governor Sullivan Chime has left the country for an undisclosed location abroad.
There were insinuations over the weekend that Governor Chime had traveled abroad again for medical treatment.
However, reacting through a statement signed by his Chief Press Secretary, Mr Chukwudi Achife, the government said that contrary to the report, the Governor was in Enugu where has continued to attend to his official duties since he returned from vacation a few weeks ago.
Achife described the story as a figment of the reporter’s imagination, expressing dismay at the ease at which such a false report has been published without any effort whatsoever to verify it.
He disclosed that Governor Chime had played host to his Bauchi State counterpart Alhaji Isa Yuguda and other important persons such as Senator Jim Nwobodo and his wife in his country home at Udi on Saturday, March 2, 2013, “whereas the report had falsely claimed that he traveled on Thursday”.
Achife stressed that the government would not have bothered to react to such an account “if not for the need to douse the unnecessary anxiety that it may raise among the people of the state”.
“It’s really disheartening that such a manifestly untrue could be published without regard to the fundamentals of ethics and professionalism. One would have thought that after all that happened when the Governor was away, our colleagues would have learnt some hard lessons about checking the veracity of their stories thoroughly before sending them out for publication. This story is another ample show of disregard for such values and I don’t think it speaks well for those who published it”, he added.
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