Another N5billion Palliative Scam

POLITICAL NOTES

Just like the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, which gulped billions of naira without any verifiable means of confirming the beneficiaries and the actual cost, the current administration of President Bola Tinubu has come up with another scheme that will end up helping public officials to smile to the banks while administering funds meant to cushion the effects of petrol subsidy removal.

Following the hardship inflicted on Nigerians with the removal of petrol subsidy, the federal government had approved N5 billion for each of the 36 states of the federation for the procurement of food items and fertilisers as part of efforts to alleviate the suffering of the masses.

Since this money was approved some states have embarked on purchasing small-sized bags of garri, tubers of yam and other food items branded as ‘palliative for subsidy removal’ for distribution to the poor.

Apart from lack of effective criteria for determining and verifying the actual beneficiaries of these food items and the amount spent on each beneficiary, it also beats one’s imagination on how a very small quantity of rice or garri packaged in a small plastic packet, which can barely feed a family of four, will make any reasonable impact in alleviating the suffering of the people.

Also, with 63 per cent of persons living within Nigeria or 133 million people multidimensionally poor, according to a previous report of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), analysts also wonder what impact a paltry sum of N5 billion can make in a state.

With no effective register or database of poor Nigerians, analysts believe that public officials will randomly select the beneficiaries and pocket the greater chunk of the money meant for the scheme.

Just like the case of former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s Poverty Alleviation Programme, officials saddled with the responsibility of distributing the palliatives will also serve the interest of only their friends, relatives and associates, leaving the poor Nigerians to their fate.

Nigerians witnessed how some government officials hoarded and later carted away items meant for the COVID-19 palliatives.

It is high time the federal government stopped ridiculing Nigeria and enriching public officials with this penchant for distributing food items to the poor as these items are like a drop of water in the ocean, and never sufficient to make any reasonable impact in the lives of the beneficiaries.