Kogi State government has instituted policies and necessary measures to protect its residents from the Vivid-19 pandemic.
It also faulted the Presidential Task Force, PTF, on Covid-19 which declared the state a high-risk state for refusing to acknowledge the existence of the disease.
The PTF also said the Kogi government had failed to report testing, lacked isolation centres and therefore warned Nigerians to be wary of visiting the state.
Reacting to the warning by the PTF, Chief Press Secretary to Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State, Muhammed Onogwu said the state Government had enforced compliance with outlined protocol but would not be part of propaganda to scale up the figures of those infected.
Onogwu said the State has been responsive in managing diseases outbreak including the Covid-19 virus.
According to him, “We think of ways to make our people live healthy and do what we need to do to make them live healthy as a state”. “The governor has made his position known, we believe in the existence of coronavirus and we have taken necessary precautions as outlined by the NCDC and other health institutions across the world, we domesticated every policy given to the people”.
Onogwu insisted that the claims against Kogi State’s handling of Covid 19 cases were sponsored by people with ‘political interests’ but added that the Bello administration is more concerned about the safety of residents of the state.
In his words, “We are not debating or arguing with the PTF or any group of people who will come in based on sentiments and political interests to say whatever they want to say but our fundamental objective as a state government is to protect the lives of the people of Kogi state”.
To him, “As we speak today going by the NCDC figure, from January to this year, they say over 1402 persons have died of Covid 19, now in the last four months, we have lost innocent Nigerians of about 1477 to banditry, kidnapping and other forms of insecurity. “The Governor has said security is the fundamental responsibility of his administration”.
According to him, We have identified from our own investigation how they have sponsored some people based on political interest to say there are mass deaths in Kogi state whereas there’s nothing like that”.
The Governor’s spokesman said the administration’s management of the pandemic had resulted in economic rewards as the state received about ‘one billion dollars in foreign investment’ in January.
“If our state is a high risk area or bedeviled with insecurity this flow of investment wouldn’t have happened. We over took Lagos in that period, so we are not interested in what the PTF say but in the well being of the people” He said.
Governor Bello who sometime last year tried to discourage the public from receiving the vaccine has however said he will not bar anyone in his state from receiving the vaccine.