A senior reporter of the Nigerian Tribune, Olakunle Timothy Taiwo, has been sacked for concocting an interview with Professor Itse Sagay, a constitutional lawyer, and scholar.
The Editor of Sunday Tribune has also been dismissed, as he was the supervisor to the erring reporter.
Taiwo, a Senior reporter at the Nigerian Tribune, published a report where he quoted Prof Sagay criticising the anti-corruption strategy of President Muhammadu Buhari.
Shortly after the report was published, Sagay said he never granted interview to anyone at the newspaper.
The Chairman of President Buhari’s advisory committee on anti-corruption denied saying all that was attributed to him in the article
The denial prompted the newspaper to issue a retraction of the story and apologise to Professor Sagay and President Buhari.
The statement released by the management of Nigerian Tribune reads thus:
“The fact of the matter is that the interview was conducted through telephone by one of our politics reporters on Thursday, December, 17th 2015 calling the interviewee on TELEPHONE NUMBER 08023137144. The normal introductory formalities, according to the reporter, were observed before the interview commenced. In the course of the interview, the person on the other side answered all questions even when he was addressed as the Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti-Corruption.
Online reports quoting Professor Sagay as denying granting the interview were, therefore, received by us with a shock. We consequently listened to the audio recording of the interview and, regrettably, discovered the voice not to be that of Professor Sagay.
While we are continuing our investigations on who the person on the other line actually was and what could have gone wrong along our own line of editorial control, a number of disciplinary actions has been taken against our key members of staff involved in the publication. Specifically, the reporter has been dismissed from the employ of the company and the Editor, Sunday Tribune, placed on indefinite suspension.
We have no reason whatsoever to put words in the mouth of the respected Professor Sagay. We apologise to him. We equally apologise to President Muhammadu Buhari and all other persons who were variously attacked in the publication. Our apologies also go to our esteemed readers. There was no deliberate action on our part to mislead our readers. We have an enviable pedigree and a long history of pioneering, in this country, a brand of journalism that upholds the truth as inviolable at all times. We have an institutional rigorous process in place that hitherto ensured this kind of unfortunate slip never took place. How this happened, escaping the control system, is part of issues we are addressing. We are taking a firm, corrective look at that mechanism again.
Once again, we promise our readers that this unfortunate incident will not happen again in our operations even as we retract the interview in its entirety.”