Edo deputy gov, Shaibu, institutes annual award for journalists

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Edo deputy gov, Shaibu, institutes annual award for journalists

Edo State Deputy Governor, Comrade Philip Shaibu, on Monday, instituted three annual awards for practising journalists in the state.

The awards, Best Investigative Journalist of the year, Best Reporter of‎ the year and Best Journalist of the year, all have a prize of N500,000 and a trophy attached to them.

The Deputy Governor who announced the institution‎ of the awards during his annual hosting of journalists, said they would be presented during next year’s hosting on December 20, 2022.

He said journalists were instrumental for his release from Gashua Prison after the Military Government claimed to have freed all those detained, saying without the investigative report of the journalists

he would not have been alive to become a deputy governor.

“I am instituting these awards because of the good jobs the journalists do in our society. As Deputy Governor today, it is the media who insisted some us were still being detained when the military junta put us in prison. If not for the journalists who insisted, we would have been forgotten,” he said.

He explained that the annual hosting of journalists, for him, is “about sharing and for you to recognise your role,” adding that democracy without the media is no democracy.

“The‎ media is the catalyst, the media mirrors the society, journalists need to balance their reports,”Shaibu added, urging the media to see government as partners in progress.

Earlier, the newly elected Chairman of the Edo State Council‎ of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, Mr. Festus Aalenkhe, called on the Edo State government to partner with journalists by investing in the State Council, just as he solicited the government to power the Secretariat of the NUJ from its Oshiomo Power Station.