Contrary to a report on an online platform, Sahara Reporters, yesterday that the First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, has been dropped from a trip with her husband to Namibia and South Africa, as a result of her ailment, the presidency yesterday said there was no iota of truth in the claim.
Instead, the Special Assistant to the President on Media, attached to the First Lady, Mr. Ayo Osinlu, said the First Lady was hale and hearty and was expected to participate as a keynote speaker at a Religious, Traditional and Adolescents Leaders Conference, an event that is part of the inauguration of the National Strategy for the Prevention of Teenage Pregnancy in Sierra Leone next week.
“Her preparation for this is well advanced,” Osinlu noted a press statement.
The aide, who
described the online report as absolutely untrue, an evil imagination and an extension of a smear campaign targeted at tarnishing the image of the First Lady, wrote that: “We wish to state emphatically that the report is absolutely untrue and a creation of the wicked expectations of Sahara Reporters and those who pay their bills.”
According to the statement, any discerning person, who had been following her events in recent days would notice that she had not only been healthy but active.
“Indeed, it will be recalled that the First Lady effectively participated in the tasking National Conference on 100 years of the Nigerian Woman, which she hosted as a component of the Centenary Celebration of the country in Lagos, April 18 to19, 2013,” the statement said.
It added that: “Those who attended or watched the event on live television (NTA and AIT) will confirm that we saw a healthy and active First Lady in attendance during the Conference.
“Only last Friday, she also presided at the inauguration of the Nigerian Prisons Staff School, built in the Federal Capital by the Prisons Officers’ Wives Association (PROWA). Media reports of the event were still trickling as at yesterday.”
The aide insisted that the story about the “deteriorated” health of his principal by the online platform is a figment of its imagination and that: “The First Lady is not an official of the Federal Government of Nigeria, and is therefore not under obligation to join every foreign trip made by her husband, in perfect expression of his statutory duty to foster both bi-lateral and multi-lateral advantages for the country.”
“The First Family is therefore at liberty to determine what trips they make together. Meanwhile, the mischief behind this online medium’s sudden worry that the First Lady is not on the President’s trip abroad is betrayed by the fact that the same medium led its allied choristers to belly-ache in the past about the frequency of her presence by her husband’s side on official engagements outside the country,” the statement further emphasised, expressing hope that in the future professionalism will override “personal irresponsibility.”
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