A Year Of Curious Donations, by Kene Obiezu

Nigeria’s year of curious donations has continued at par with the First Lady, Dr. Oluremi Tinubu again leading the chasing pack.
In anticipation and commemoration of the yuletide, the First Lady recently doled out the total sum of 1.9 billion Naira to older individuals across the country. The sum of two hundred thousand Naira given to each older person marked a sharp increase from the one hundred thousand Naira given out last year.

Since becoming the First Lady, she has been donating massive amounts of money to causes close to her heart. When floods wreaked havoc in Borno State some months ago, she was at hand with a generous donation to the victims of the flood.

However, despite the seeming generosity, it must be asked where the First Lady is drawing the humongous amounts of money she is giving out from. It may seem an irrelevant question giving that she is supposedly touching lives. But in a country like Nigeria where corruption is rife and accountability and transparency long gone out of the window, tracing the source of the money matters even more than the giving.
It cannot be that public funds are left public officers or their family members to use as they wish while Nigerians wallow in poverty.

At the last convocation of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) Ile-Ife, where the First Lady was conferred with an honorary doctorate degree, she donated the sum of one billion Naira to the university.

These interventions as necessary and as laudable as they are must be questioned. Upon his inauguration in 2023, President Tinubu’s family became the country’s first family. Though, there is no law that recognizes anyone else from his family except the president, family members of Nigerian presidents have been known to put themselves in the faces of Nigerians, showing a jarring pack of discretion and caution. A case in point was the way and manner Muhammadu Buhari’s family treated his office as if it were personal property.
President Tinubu is yet to prove himself in office. He is yet to keep the promises he made to Nigerians during his campaign and since he was sworn in. Though the morning shows the day, it still seems too early to declare that he has failed. Since the jury is still out on his performance in office, it appears a bit injudicious that his family members appear to freely throw money about in the name of interventions that lack genuine transparency and altruism.

The pervasive material and mental poverty Nigerians are burdened with has turned them into a mendicant lot with all the vulnerabilities that come with being that. They expect to be given; they expect messiahs and are quick to label monsters as messiahs; they are easily carried away and even quicker to sell their birthright for a pot of porridge or cast their pearls before swine. Still, their suffering continues.

It is not enough that anyone with access to public funds throws money around in the name of philanthropy, charity or whatever else it is called. Far from it. In a country where public officers have been known to steal their fellow citizens blind, Nigerians must learn to question those who have access to public funds.

Nigerians should recalibrate their expectations of public officers and those with access to public funds. They should move beyond expecting them to throw money at them to score cheap political points at every occasion to demand that every Naira of public funds be accounted for and properly spent to give Nigerians maximum social security as well as improve their lives.
Unless the approach changes, Nigerians will continue to feed on scraps while corruption continues to scythe through the country at will.

Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com