Five students were killed and several others reportedly injured during a riot by students who wanted a share of the ₦15 million distributed by the Akwa Ibom State governor Godswill Akpabio. The tragedy occurred yesterday at the Government House Uyo and the Ibom Hall where undergraduate students and unemployed graduates gathered at the instance of the state governor.
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Mr. Akpabio had announced a ₦10 million largesse for undergraduate students who were supposed to get their money at the Government House. His running mate in the gubernatorial election, Nsima Ekere, was billed to distribute the rest ₦5 million to unemployed graduates who converged at the Ibom Hall.
Trouble started with the rumour that organisers of the event have taken away ₦4 million out of the ₦10 million given to the students. After waiting for more than four hours for the remaining ₦6 million to be shared, the students started a protest.
The protest turned into a stampede as security agencies tried to remove them from the premises. In the ensuing scramble, gunshots were fired by the police and the protesting students responded by hurling stones at the police officers.
Some months ago:
For the nation’s 50th year anniversary celebrations the president’s wife, Patience Jonathan, decided to share bags of rice to “alleviate the poverty” of local women – and did this in the crudest, most elementary way possible – by calling people together and throwing them bags of rice like beggars.
By the time she was through, there were plenty of casualties, some fatal, as citizens struggled not just for rice but also against the complete absence of crowd control measures or indeed any kind of preparation to handle the melee that was sure to ensue from that method of distribution.
The bottom line: someone wanted to make a public show of doing good, but the action was neither thought through nor planned well; a metaphor for many of this administration’s handling of crucial issues.
When these politicians (and their wives) want to generate cheap popularity, they pull stunts like this. There is really no institutionalized or systemic government-run social welfare net in our Federal Republic. Oh, there are a lot of agencies that in theory fulfill that role, but in practice with an estimated (more like guess-timated) 70% of the population in need of some form of social welfare assistance (including significantly health care, education and nutrition), the fact is most Nigerians don't receive anything of note from any of the three tiers of government.
Mind you, it isn't simply a lack of will. Much more important than that is the lack of resources, even if the will was there. On this blog, I have criticized Amina Az Zubair and the Millennium Development Goals Office because they keep talking about what they believe they will achieve, without being honest about the fact that they have never been given sufficient resources/funding to achieve the things they say they want to achieve.
Adding all three tiers of government in the Federal Republic together, there simply isn't enough in the budget to fund any such programmes .... and what little funding there is (relative to our HUGE population) is wasted on a political-administrative structure that pays for far too many political office-holders of one sort or another, as well as funding the patron/client networks connected to each office-holder "legally" (examples include excessive/unnecessary/disadvantageous contract awards and the use of one's office to bend commercial/market/economic decisions in the direction of one's self, one's patrons and one's clients) and illegally (including but not limited to outright theft).
Every once in a while, in every state of the Federal Republic you hear of political figures magnanimously distributing rice .... or motorcycles .... or raw cash. Sometimes the political figure establishes himself as a "Pillar of Sports", pouring cash into the state's professional football club, or creating a new club from scratch.
They do this in a highly personalized way. Rather than create an institutionalized or systemic method of continuously and consistently provided welfare assistance for citizens, they prefer random, one-off EVENTS .... with the magnanimous political figure clearly identified as the source of the largesse.
But are they really the source? Aren't they just spending GOVERNMENT MONEY, which belongs to all citizens, and which is supposed to be budgeted for in an organized fashion on a yearly basis .... as opposed to spent in bulk on nothing more than the private whim of a political figure? And I am not just talking about individuals who are in government; those out of government are usually spending funds acquired through dubious, unfulfilled contracts -- and in one case giving us millions of dollars from a billion-dollar stash gained from the receipt of an oil block given by a military dictatorship that bought political influence by dashing oil blocks to political friends (and federal ministers).
They take our money .... and then make us thank them for dribbling a few crumbs of our own money back into our hands. We have to beg them, kiss their arses, and praise them to high heaven because money that could have improved electricity, water-supply, education, healthcare or roads went into someone's pocket, and that someone has pitied us and dashed us a few kobo to use and buy groundnut.
How did we allow ourselves to fall so low?
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