Anti-poor coalition?  

By Hardball

What ails the critics of the Federal Government’s schools feeding programme, even after the minister in charge has explained the modalities of that novel scheme, in the novel COVID-19 season?

Learned silk, Chief Afe Babalola, SAN, wanted the scheme cancelled and its funding vired, into procuring testing machines for public universities — probably to fasten the resumption of the university calendar?

Not an illegitimate opinion, except that feeding elementary school pupils and equipping universities for COVID-19 challenges should really not be competing.  Both should enjoy prime state investment, for they deal with crucial human capital development.

So, what really is the wisdom of junking that duty at the basic level, and transferring its funding to the tertiary level?  Do you build an edifice from the roof top?

The African Democratic Congress (ADC), former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s “third force” Trojan horse, in the 2019 presidential election, has also weighed in.

By its own democratic wisdom, from the sagely mouth of Yemi Kolapo, it’s national publicity secretary, the FG should, to quote The Nation’s reportage of his take, shift attention to “containing the spread of COVID-19 and mitigating the economic impact of both the pandemic and the fall in international oil prices.”

But how can feeding vulnerable school kids, by tracing their parents and giving them rations in raw foodstuffs, be inimical to mitigating the economic impact of COVID-19-19? Because the voiceless and the most vulnerable families are the beneficiaries?

Many an agitated media commentator has also jumped into fray, screaming that schools are closed, you can’t possibly feed school pupils out of school, and hinting at the ultimate blackmail: “they”, meaning those driving the programme, just want to “chop” the money!

Don’t even try engaging this bristling, all-knowing type because it’s simply a dialogue with the deaf.  But suffice it to put a few posers?  Are pupils registered without addresses?  Do these children belong to ghost families, that can’t be traced?

True, the logistics may be challenging — but challenging hardly equates impossibility.  By all means critique public policy, particularly direct-citizen investment, novel to the Nigerian clime.

But never ever dismiss the hard thinking of others, simply because of the wilful self-limitation of your own thinking.  That way you help to refine, instead of summarily shut down what you don’t really understand.

So, is there a brewing coalition against the poor and the vulnerable?  Yet, this same lobby would bleat, when it pleases them: “there is mass hunger in the land!”

Hajiya Sadiya Umar-Farouk, the minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, should ignore the nay orchestra and faithfully implement the pro-poor policies and programmes under her care.

The poor have as much right to government care, as the howling and hustling elite.  It’s a question of bounden and solemn government-to-citizen duty, not some subversive or cynical elite charity, driven by contemptuous pity.