By Christy Anyanwu
It was a day of succour for the underprivileged in Ilupeju, Lagos, as they trooped out to receive bags of rice, chicken, water and bread from a Non-Governmental Organisation, Committee of Friends for Humanity (Coffha).
Tagged: ‘Food Day’, the event took place at Fountain Gardens, Ilupeju, Lagos with over 500 persons queuing up patiently to receive the gift items.
President of the association, Mrs. Nkechi Ali-Balogun, disclosed that the philanthropic gesture started during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown when people were stranded, cashless, hungry, and in dire need.
“Sometimes, we share raw foodstuff like rice, chicken and cakes during Christmas; but a day like this, being Workers’ Day, May 1st, we give food. We do it quarterly, but today we chose Workers’ Day. We don’t restrict ourselves to a particular location, we shower love everywhere,” she said.
Explaining the essence of the NGO, Mrs. Ali-Balogun added: “We look around us in response to the needs, in response to the hunger around us. We just look at ways to try to mitigate one of those things, and that was how Coffha Food Day began. The food we share is for people who can’t afford to buy food. The first food day was in Surulere where we fed over a 1,000. This is about the third (edition).”
Mrs. Ali-Balogun stated that the group does not have much funds, but has given back to society with the little at their disposal. “We have built hospitals and given hospital beds. Another initiative during my tenure is Coffha Helping Hands, which focuses on payment of hospital bills, because we realised that for as little as N4,000, people were dying.
“Coffha Helping Hands is a medical bill for people who cannot afford to buy even malaria tablets. At any given time we go on such hospital outreach, we spend nothing less than N500,000 and we do that like four times in a year.”
She explained further that every quarter, the group raises money from friends through sponsorship requests, asking them to give towards this cause, and the group realised that if 1,000 people should give N1,000, that would amount to a huge sum of money and really we started having a lot of money, which was dedicated strictly to health.
“If you are not a giver or someone who empathizes with people, passionate enough about people to pick up the downtrodden, you cannot be a Coffha member, because to be a member of Coffha, you must have empathy, a giving heart and be flexible with your time.
“Everything we do here today is from our purse. Even when we donated 25 hospital beds, it was from our purse. We levy ourselves and we do the needful. Once in a while, we have sponsors and in the last quarter of 2023, someone sponsored Coffha Helping Hands.”
Mrs. Carol Ufere, immediate past president of Coffha, reiterated that giving and putting smiles on the faces of the underprivileged was the bedrock of Coffha as an organization. The Food Day, she said, began shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown and ever since the organization has not looked back. Barrister Augustina Igbokwe and Mrs. Prisca Nwadialu, staunch members of Coffha, said they were happy to be part of the event.
“Things are very difficult. Sometimes you wonder how people are coping. If there’s a time to help anybody, this is the time, no matter how little. God will take care of the rest. We pray that God will give us more grace to do more in the next outreach because we tax ourselves to do this particular outreach,” she said.