Posted by By Sun News Publishing on
For daring to break the story of the budget scam in the House of Representatives and leading the Sunday Sun with it for two consecutive weeks, the life of the editor, Funke Egbemode, is being threatened.
For daring to break the story of the budget scam in the House of Representatives and leading the Sunday Sun with it for two consecutive weeks, the life of the editor, Funke Egbemode, is being threatened.
In the last 48 hours, Egbemode has received strange phone calls in addition to warnings from those who said they were calling as well-wishers.
According to Egbemode, 'the first call came from someone who mentioned the names of two members of the House of Representatives whom, he said, he overheard discussing that they had decided to come after me for daring to publish the story.
He told me to be careful where I go and who I speak with in the days ahead. He told me that the plan to harm me may not be known to all the members but it was real all the same."
Daily Sun findings later in the day showed that a certain group has been formed to do the hatchet job and ensure that Egbemode is ‘permanently kept out of circulation'.
'At about 5.00pm, I got another call that a member of the newly constituted group is moving around with smear stories on me and how it was a matter of time before I would be silenced. Considering those behind the plot, I know they are capable of everything and anything.
They have a track record of meanness. They are experts at both smear campaigns and hatchet jobs and since they cannot punch holes in the story, they have decided to come after me," continued Egbemode who stressed that it had therefore become imperative to alert security agencies and the general public that her life was being threatened for quoting from a public document and doing a job she is being paid for.
'Nobody has accused me of forging the document or publishing from a false document. They just want to rubbish me for doing my job and having the courage to run a story they thought was sacred. The nation's budget is for and about Nigerians. I fail to see what I have done wrong. If one editor has to be killed or smeared so that the national budget can be kept out of view, then we are all in trouble," Egbemode said.
In the April 13 edition of the Sunday Sun , the paper led with story of the budget with the headline: House bazaar: Reps splash N2.7bn on New Cars. It also ran a follow-up on April 20: Budget scam: How Reps milk Nigeria.
Meanwhile the House Committee Chairman on Media and Publicity, Hon Eziuche Ubani, in a statement on Tuesday, titled The matter with the house budget confirmed The Sunday Sun story saying that 'as representatives of the people who should at all times be accountable to them, we can confirm that such discrepancies exist in the 2008 budget."
We state clearly that these errors were discussed in the meeting between the leadership of the National Assembly and the Executive which preceded the signing of the 2008 Appropriation Bill. Indeed, we had on our own made these observations, and are totally concerned by the existence of garbled headings and sub-heads."