Did you ever hear of a cooking device known as clean cookstove? Would you recognise one if someone handed it to you? Did you ever have a problem about how to cook your meals? Do you think handing stove to people – whether cookstove or crooked ones, should ever be a matter for the Federal Executive Council, FEC, where the president of a country sits to consider urgent matters of grave national importance?
It is because of matters like this that Hardball is eternally and wholesomely cynical about the President Goodluck Jonathan era and thinks it is the most pathetic regime that ever happened here. Please let us consider the clean cookstove saga and tell me thereafter if Jona cynicism is not a most healthful emotion to sustain.
Late last year, at the onset of the current economic recession when Madam Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was telling us about belt-tightening, FEC announced to a bewildered nation one of those Wednesdays that it had awarded a contract for the purchase and distribution of 750,000 clean cookstoves. Contract sum: N9.2 billion. Ha, just like that, where is this stove thing coming from all of a sudden? And all this money – about one tenth of some African country’s budget – just for some stove?
The entire stove narrative is as incongruous as the Jonathan administration was an absurdity. Environment is among the single most important issue elsewhere; here it is honey pot for politicians and civil servants. All the funds for preserving our world here are simply debased and designated as ‘free fund’ and then vaporised by people in authority who need it most to import bigger autos (‘machines’) to further debase the environment. It’s suicidal irony. So the clean cookstove is one such ironies of Nigeria’s environment.
Why would the Federal Government get into the mire of purchasing stoves for rural Nigerians? What would some of these people do with these stoves when they have not earned salary for months? How would a mere 750,000 units of stove help our vast country and large population? Why is each unit of stove sold for N4,000 in the open market ordered at N12,000 by the Federal Government? Why did the former president approve for us to import stoves we can manufacture here? Kenya is said to have set up an industrial complex to manufacture millions of even better such stoves for only N1 billion? Why are the contractors supplying gas stoves instead of clean cook stoves?
Questions are too numerous. And we ask finally, why was it the pastime of the Jonathan government to do things that always left a trail of embarrassing questions?
Finally, what is the out-gone Minister of Environment, Mama Lawrencia Laraba-Mallam, doing plodding about in this unclean, crooked stove mess? If we must play in the muck of graft, we allowed to apply some commonsense; a little bit of method makes madness palatable, they say.
What’s this clean crooked stove?
