Top members of the Media and Communication Directorates of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council (PCC), Bayo Onanuga and Dele Alake, have said that the Arise TV town hall debate is designed by Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of This Day Newspaper and Arise News Television, Nduka Obaigbena, to embarrass Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the flag-bearer of the ruling party.
POLITICS NIGERIA reports that the battle between the APC PCC and ThisDay/ Arise TV has become messier and personal.
On Monday evening, the APC PCC in a joint statement issued by Messrs Onanuga and Dele Alake, attacked Obaigbena, over a critical editorial by the media organisation boards of editors.
In the statement, the PCC accused Obaigbena and the media platform of corruption and lacking the moral rights to moderate public discourse.
Responding on Tuesday, Obaigbena, in a four-page rebuttal stressed that journalists were not the opponents of Tinubu in the forthcoming 2023 election.
While noting that although many APC-PCC members, had personally called to dissociate themselves from the resort to blackmail, personal attacks and bullying by Alake and Onanuga, the statement noted that, “everyday the media calls on public officials and those who seek public office to account,” establishing that there was nothing personal with the APC candidate.
But Onanuga and Alake fired back on Wednesday night.
“Obaigbena tried to deflect attention from those pertinent issues we raised about ethics. There is nothing he said to creditably detract a jot from our accurate summation of his well-known perverse and ignoble approach to media practice over the years, a practice that continues to undermine the integrity of journalism profession in the country.
“In his first statement attacking us, Obaigbena craftily attempted to mis-characterise as an attack on free speech, our principled stand against his blackmail to have Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu appear on Arise TV and its PDP sponsored Town Hall meetings.
“In the second statement, he was still adamant that our candidate must attend his Town Hall debate, despite our stance that our candidate is already executing another communications strategy to reach the most important target: the Nigerian voters.
“We, repeat again: We will not make our candidate available to validate a scheme which, in the light of unassailable information at our disposal, is nothing but a racket by the Arise TV owner, designed to embarrass our candidate,” the statement by the Media and Communication Directorates of APC’s PCC partly reads.
