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Daily Trust head office, Abuja
By Anthony Maliki
The Irigwe Development Association (IDA) has condemned the publication of Daily Trust Newspaper of Sunday August 15, 2021 accusing the body for the attack of Saturday, August 14, 2021 along Rukuba Road in Jos leading to the death of 23 commuters.
The bold front-page headline of its Sunday edition states: “Irigwe youths kill 25 Fulani travellers in Jos, over 50 missing”.
In a statement by the association’s National Publicity Secretary, Davidson Malison on Sunday, it frowned at the report stating that no court of competent jurisdiction has declared the Irigwe youths guilty of committing the act.
According to it, the caption of the report is not only malicious but vicious in its entirety and capable of placing the Rigwe Nation on the map of bad people.
“One would wonder how quickly the National Daily arrived at the identity of the victims and perpetrators when no formal investigation has been carried out. Could it that there’s more to this swift profiling of Rigwe people? This, we shall unravel soonest,” the statement stressed.
The IDA noted that “the report was done on the platter of religious and ethnicity as the elements used are purely inciting, instigating and trouble fomenting and this is completely against the ethics and codes of journalism and reportage which stipulates that a journalist should refrain from making pejorative reference to a person’s ethnic group, religion, sex or to any physical or mental illness or handicap.
Part of the statement also read: “This has not only revealed the unprofessional nature of the Daily Trust Newspaper but has shown how unqualified they are in terms of information management as peace journalism has been relegated by them and had their focus shifted to emotion and promotion and propagation of violence and conflict.
“While the leadership of Irigwe Development Association (IDA) continued to condemn the barbaric act that occurred along Rukuba Road of Jos North on the 14th August, 2021 where some hoodlums attacked a convoy of five buses and killed some commuters while several others sustained varying degree of injuries, we want to reiterate that such heinous act was not in any way perpetrated by Rigwe Youth”, the association noted.
