DID I JUST HEAR SOMEONE SAY: “WHAT COULD ANYONE DO WITH 8,000 NAIRA?”

By

JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

There’s this young guy from Cross River who sells noodles and eggs at night on Ademola Adetokunbo Crescent in Wuse, Abuja, whom I asked what he thought of N8000 per month to a poor person.

He simply said “oga, it will work wonders for their stomach, o!”

Almost twenty years ago, my mother and I ran into a distant relation of ours at Igbudu Market in Warri who told us she would be pretty fine if only she “saw” N5,000 to start “bush market” fruit and vegetables business (the vendor goes into remote villages to buy fruits and veggies for sail in urban centers).

We gave her the N5,000 on the spot.

Only a few years ago, I once took it upon myself to find out from the beneficiaries (who happened to be mostly market women) of a cash empowerment program of a certain senator, what the N20,000 he was giving them each really meant to them.

At that time a bottle of champagne at the average nightclub in Delta cost about the same N20,000 but these women actually succeeded in convincing me it was truly important to their businesses!

There is this notion held by certain Nigerians that cash transfers and similar programs are not the way to go and that the money is better allocated elsewhere.

Funny enough, even in the richest and very best run countries in the world, cash transfers, food stamps, tax credits and the like are staples of governance!

There is simply absolutely no single economy in the entire world wherein some people do not end up falling through the cracks and would be destituted by their privations but for state intervention.

There are many poor people in Nigeria and the fact that you cannot help them all cannot justify not helping any of them at all.

They are our citizens and are entitled to government attention as much as to its intervention in their lives.

They are bona fide Nigerians, therefore the responsibility of our President and his government.

Someone just suggested on a platform I belong to that President Bola Tinubu should jettison the N8,000 palliative and use the money instead to build 12 world class hospitals, two each per geopolitical zone.

I responded that it is not cash transfers to our poorest citizens that will prevent government from being able to build 12 world class hospitals; that cash transfers and hospital construction are not mutually exclusive; and, that both can be quite harmoniously achieved, side by side.

I do not intend to suggest that anyone or any government is above correction, advice or criticism but to suppose that Bola Tinubu, of all people, would not know whether it is better to dispense palliatives or build hospitals is not to know the quality of man and mettle of leader he is.

If anyone understands the importance of spurring growth and creating employment opportunities, it is certainly President Tinubu.

If anyone can both provide infrastructure for our country and prevent as many of our citizens as possible from having to go to bed on an empty stomach, it is undoubtedly the Asiwaju.

It is perfectly understandable that people of a certain income bracket (that is, people like me) might not appreciate N8,000 (that’s about the cost of a Long Island iced tea at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja) but it is real power in the hands of a mother with barely an income yet with one, two, three, four or more hungry little kids to feed.

Bola Tinubu is as much her President as he is mine.

*Onokpasa, a lawyer, was a member of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council and writes from Abuja.