Mr. Idahosa Asowota
By Gabriel Agbonika, Abuja
Mr Idahosa Asowota is a retired journalist and my good friend for over twenty years. He had a stroke about 2 years ago and now pathetically living on wheelchair without money for medical treatment and appropriate feeding.
This situation has recently compelled him to seek financial help from friends, family members and well wishers in order to meet up his health challenges.
Mr. Idahosa’s predicament is not different from many young and old journalists who have left journalism work without payment of “gratuity and pension entitlement” because most established media organizations in Nigeria don’t even pay normal salaries to their workers not to talk of paying gratuity or pension to their exiting workers.
For example during the COVID-19 pandemic, many journalists suffered heavily because no palliative measures put in place by various organizations reached practicing and retired journalists. Yet, journalists are presumed and called to be “fourth realms of the government.”
With the current subsidy removal hardship affecting most Nigerians, the plight of journalists in Nigeria can only be best imagined as they are expected to perform the same services of “information, entertainment and enlightenment of the citizens. This responsibilities carry a lot of sacrifices and hardship especially with very little resources in the prevailing situation.
I am therefore appealing to government of President Bola Tinubu to factor practicing journalists in Nigeria into the proposed fuel subsidy palliative measures in order to cushion their hardship, particularly retired journalists who are going through severe financial crisis without payment of gratuities and pensions at the end of their patriotic services to their father land.
