How many hearts filled with grief will balance an offshore account? How many homes – cold, poverty-stricken, scam-activated, shall balance ill-acquired “executive estacode” and “constituency allowance?” How do we measure progress on the watch of men given to scams and plunder?
Despite the misery doled unto us, piecemeal…savagely and in large chunks, we are yet to affect appropriate rage and displeasure. We have evolved from the people that made the hare-brained determiners of our life course to become the decadents whose fortunes hang askew because we have learnt to enjoy our tragedies as sport; like the mother who gets off by watching the father sodomise the son.
President Muhammadu Buhari, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and company, represent our only hope even as you read; yet the purportedly Spartan President and Vice President frantically radiate desultory sparks of moonshine and call it the great sun beams of a prosperous future.
How can Buhari and Osibajo’s purported frugality and uprightness compensate for the scary, conniving, creepy characters we have in the nation’s upper and lower legislative chambers? How will their much hyped and oft exaggerated morality dull the misery inflicted on us by a corrupt judiciary and civil service?
How can these two men quell the inferno of greed and inclinations to pilfer burning through the souls of our executive governors, local government chairmen and so on? They are just two men after all; there is too little Buhari and Osinbajo can do to assuage our pains and institute a truly humane leadership and citizenship in the country.
That is why they can persistently harp on their determination to live up to their campaign promise by paying N5, 000 monthly to impoverished families in the country.
Speaking on the initiative in the run-up to the March 28 presidential polls, Osinbajo stated that the initiative is meant to support 25 million of 119 million extremely poor Nigerians who earn less than N200 a day to take care of their families. The vice president added that the fast way of dealing with that is the N5,000 monthly Conditional Cash Transfer Programme.
“We will give N5, 000 to the poorest 25 million over a phased period, if their children are enrolled in school and participate in immunization…So we are actually doing two things; we are giving stipends to the very poorest and ensuring that in order to earn that stipend they certify two conditions,” he said.
Osinbajo said that the party decided on the 25 million figure because that is what they can deal with in the first phase, adding that “we are looking at phasing it over a period because it will cost about N1.35 trillion to do so if we do all 25 million at once.”
He said the N1.35 trillion they are proposing for the Conditional Cash Transfer Programme’ is not so much compared to the AMCON bailout of “persons who are in debt, many businesses and businessmen and it cost N5.7 trillion to do and that is a bailout of the relatively wealthy.”
Recently, Vice President Osinbajo has been responding to criticisms by opposition party goons that the initiative is unrealistic. According to him the government will make good its pledge. While the initiative may be in tandem with similar practices around the world, one wonders how the APC would run the programme at the backdrop of unreliable national statistics; how will the APC identify those that are actually in need of the palliative without turning the scheme into a scam and cesspit for political discrimination and patronage? How cost-effective and realistic is the venture in the face of systemic corruption and at a period that the country grapples with depressive economy?
At this point, it is important to stress that such spurious palliative introduced by the duo was not booed during their campaign for the presidency lest the witless PDP misappropriates it as weaponry in its arsenal of vitriol and inarticulate drivel en route the recently concluded presidential elections.
Nigerians do not need the much hyped N5, 000 alms rather the citizenry needs Mr. President and his deputy to man-up and take pragmatic steps to correct the persistent social and economic ills plaguing the country. Of course, the country suffers no dearth of corrective and progressive ideas, what had always been lacking is a courageous leadership, daring enough to tackle the countries monstrosities head-on and conquer them, for the benefit of the citizenry and successive generations.
The incumbent leadership should know better than assault our hearing with far-fetched narratives of monuments they will establish in our interest. They seem to forget that greatness is basically achieved by the productive effort of a man’s heart in the pursuit of clearly defined, visible and rational goals. Nigerians will no longer be taken by their ornamentally couched life-boat palliatives and hastily conceived monuments they desperately put up.
It’s about time President Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo understood that Nigerians have become more wary of the public officer bearing gifts and promises of bliss. We know he is usually the one seeking to win our hearts that he might get to break it, for the umpteenth time.
We shall no longer be deceived by the appalling recklessness with which they campaign and project “government with a human face. Oftentimes, the hallmark of such “humanitarian” campaign is the advocacy of some limitless grand scale public goal or initiative, without regard to context, costs or means of achieving it.
Nigerians would like to see Buhari and Osinbajo validate their promises, touted ethics and projections by the best of dependable philosophies and deeds of human existence –the citizenry need a great deal more than “life-boat” solutions like the N5, 000 stipend. We do not live for the mercy of “lifeboats,” such base and patronising palliative is hardly fertile earth in which to sow and harvest our fruits of hope, ‘Change’ and metaphysics.
Nigerians need them to resolve the conflicting characteristics of our tribal mentality even as they validate and attain a worthy equilibrium between, say, the expediency of wiping off our slums vis-à-vis the desirability and affordability of beautifully planned cities and suburbs.
Buhari and Osinbajo should be done evaluating and projecting our given concretes by their abstract principles, it is time to gauge the most probable if not practicable outcomes of their promises, in the throes of ruthlessly objective and rational processes of thought.
We need the incumbent leadership to actualise its blueprint for the provision and sustenance of good roads and electricity, standard health care and security, stable economy and quality education among others; we are done lusting and living for their life-boat and oft futile palliatives. The N5, 000 monthly is certainly one such venture. Buhari and Osinbajo need to get more creative and humane.
NATION
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