Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State, weekend, said he was shocked at his selection by the board of editors of Vanguard newspapers as the governor of the year 2021.
Obaseki said this when a team of editors led by the Deputy Editor, Mr Adekunle Adekoya, visited his office to officially present to him his letter of selection for the award coming up next month.
He said: “I tell you that this came to me as a shock, reason being that I have never seen Vanguard as a friendly newspaper to our administration. We have evidence of this fact.
“With the run-off to our re-election, the stories that were coming out were not fair particularly the political stories. So I am surprised that the newspaper I did not see as a friendly newspaper is giving me an award. It means maybe they are either taking different positions or they have actually done their work to select me.
“We are not an award seeking government. The greatest award we would have asked was the award from the people during my re-election in 2020 because if you were reading the newspapers across the country, including Vanguard, I had no chance of re-election because as far as the rest of the country was concerned, Obaseki wasn’t going to win.
“But there is a new generation of people with fresher ideas because a child that was six years old in 1999 is 29 today. Those are our focus because tomorrow must come but the majority of our leaders have not really appreciated these current realities.
“I want to commend the decision of the board. Vanguard is our paper in the South-South. There are some newspapers you don’t see here but there is a physical copy of the Vanguard here every day. The distribution here is very high but we don’t want Vanguard to be the only paper in the newsstand, so we are revamping the Nigerian Observer very soon with a digital press.”
Earlier, Adekoya said Obaseki was selected after chronicling his achievements in his first term like uptake in investment promotion initiatives in the state, Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation, EdoBEST, initiative; the Make Edo Great Again, MEGA agenda for his second term and other achievements.
In the entourage to the governor were Editor, Saturday Vanguard, Anibeze Onochie; his Sunday Vanguard counterpart, Wale Akinola; the News Editor, Kenneth Ehigiator and the South-South Regional Editor, Emma Amaize.
Vanguard
