Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has described as ‘fake news’, reports that members of the Presidential Task Force for the Control of Coronavirus were receiving N500,000 each as daily sitting allowance.
Mohammed, a member of the task force, spoke when he featured on the Nigeria Television Authority’s programme, ‘Tuesday Live’.
The minister said the purveyors of ‘fake news’ were bent on distracting the government.
“The motives behind the upsurge are to distract the government and discredit the main actors so that they can be battling with the fake news instead of Covid-19,” he said.
“Some of the fake new are totally ridiculous but some are a mixture of fiction and science that make them sometimes believable.
“At the end of the day, they are meant to achieve the purposes of distracting government and castigate those who are carrying out the policies and programmes of government by accusing them of corruption
“For instance, the allegation that each member of the task force are getting half a million everyday as sitting allowance has led to many of us receiving accounts from many people.
“Those who believe that if you are getting such huge amount of money daily, you must share it with them, but we will not be distracted.”
Mohammed said the government was deploying many strategies to contain ‘fake news’, some of which are campaign to media houses, and cooperation with Facebook and Google.
