Drop the budget, talk about welfare

It’s the brand New Year 2017 and we must start on a positive note. So, happy new year peeps and welcome to the Welfarist Republic of Naija. Yes, some of you missed the informal declaration but it is finally here. While this may rankle global imperialist forces, for those of us on the left or […]

It’s the brand New Year 2017 and we must start on a positive note. So, happy new year peeps and welcome to the Welfarist Republic of Naija. Yes, some of you missed the informal declaration but it is finally here. While this may rankle global imperialist forces, for those of us on the left or should I say who are left out of the political scheme of things, these are refreshing moments. Sai Baba has kick-started the new year in a big way with a big announcement, or two if you count like Sesame Street’s Gary Gnu. 

First, one million hopelessly poor families are finally on government payroll. This is good news and an inch further to the welfare state. Wait my two states Kano and Kogi are on the pilot scheme. Wailers won’t see anything to hail in what has taken 56 years of independence to manifest. To those who heckle the APC when it removed the phantom subsidy saying if we must mirror what happens in Naija to events in Saudi Arabia, we must do for our citizens what Saudi royals do for theirs, here is a sign that Sai Baba is a listening president by default hearing aid.

The second news is as good. Yagba people say you must make adequate provision for anyone who insist on shortening your ration. And so it is that while some may say that $12 dollar a month is too small, majority of Africa’s poor live on less than a dollar a day. Sai Baba has repented and is now disbursing N65,000 (about $150) monthly to Naija-Delta brigands. We must forget the disparity and hail this as a deft move, because without peace in that region, the oil that makes these projects possible would not flow through ruptured pipes or incinerated refineries. We must thank the brigands, sorry ex-brigands for their sense of nationalism; for who does not know that even with the oil glut, a barrel of oil is almost $50 right now. If these guys were not nationalists, they could drop the $150 monthly stipend and keep selling to pirates or refining in their backyards. 

I know wailers would still argue that it seems to take violence to benefit from the common wealth of this nation. Violence is unleashed on the nation from the executhief through the legislathief and even in the judisharing. That fever is catching up everywhere.

Nasir el-Rufai confessed tracing murderers to Niger and Chad and paid them to stay off Southern Kaduna and it seems the local marauders want a piece of the action, so they keep burning and looting. The federal government exchanged Boko Haram killers for innocent Chibok girls. If Sai Baba must run this welfare or socialist state, he needs the oil from the creeks to flow into refineries in Kaduna and elsewhere. 

There are those who question the criteria for sharing this $12 forgetting our friendship with the Bretton Wood institutions, a badge of honour on our independence. What we cannot do, they can do better and for free provided we pay their consultants. Without their endorsement, we would never know the road to the federal reserve with an overvalued Naira!

I am more optimistic than wailers in this instance. With Sai Baba’s turare, BVN and Magu’s pictures starring at would-be thieves everywhere except in Babachir Lawal, Abba Kyari et al’s office, this money would have ended up as grasscutter funds or at worst, where Better Life, NALDA, DIFRRI, FEAP, NAPEP etc ended. By the time Sai Baba must have flushed the clogged sewage in Aso Rock and left, there would be no salacious reports of how stealing continued to thrive as corruption. I guess this is one of the reasons for the whistleblower thing in the budget, so that we all could shine our eyes wherever we see ministry officials exchanging fists with Arik Air officials at MMIA for alleged sloppy services – we immediately know that it is their dead weight that is preventing them from flying. In that case we should introduce them to Magu.

There is a malaise of the poor. Each time the poor receives a lifeline, he takes a second or third wife and the breeding continues. We must ask the Obas, Obis and Emirs in whose domain poverty is getting the shock treatment to make sure that nobody on the $15 stipend uses the cash to marry. Benefitting wives must treat their husbands well to prevent them from spending their $15 does at Iya Basira’s joint.

Assuming that poverty could be defeated on paper, Sai Baba might do it before leaving. In 2016, he empowered 200,000 volunteer jobs, fed 3.5 million school children, and now this. With projects like this, why should anybody worry about how much is spent on cutleries or curtailing invasive plant species at IDP camps; they chop, we chop – that balances the equation. So let’s stop talking about budgets and inner-circle thieves and talk about welfare.