Kashim Shettima, Borno State Governor, has appealed to the Nigerian Guild of Editors, NGE, to set up an endowment fund to provide financial and other support to families of deceased editors.
He demonstrated commitment to this call by also donating a N10 million take off grant for the scheme.
Shettima made the appeal during an interactive session with editors of Newspapers and senior broadcast journalists in Lagos.
He said that the suggestion came as a result of what happened to the family of a late editor who was his friend.
Shettima explained that after his friend retired and died, the wife could not afford to send the children to school because she couldn’t afford the fees of the private school. “That friend of mine was the breadwinner of his extended family; he lived in a rented house somewhere in Nigeria. His Newspaper paid his entitlements as it should, but we all know that such couldn’t have gone anywhere given what we all know about the salary structure of the Nigerian media industry and even the civil service generally except for some government and corporate establishments.
“So, I became very disturbed when I learnt that my friend’s children were out of school, funny enough, I was a commissioner for education, so we adopted the education of the children, paying the fees. As God would have it, the eldest of the children passed WAEC with seven distinctions including Mathematics and English, so I reached out to a commissioner of education in one state because the young man wasn’t from Borno and luckily, the then commissioner of education in that state was a very good man and we were close too, he assisted and that my friend’s son was able to secure university education,” he explained.
WhatsApp us