The ball keeps rolling down the hill. And now, one of the legacies we pride ourselves with is the inroad of an almajiri economy. It’s implementation pays you stipend for being jobless, not providing you job. Your kids get fed in school and not you getting empowered to feed your kids.

At the last count, the government announced that it has expanded the school kids feeding programme to 14 states and the latest budget stood at N6.2b for those. That translates to about N442m per state and when it must have gone round all states, if it would, then expect a bill of about N16b for all. But what they have not actually told us is what period of time the bill covers. Is it this within the current year’s budget or since inception sometime last year?

While those issues may ot matter so much, what is more compelling is that we have stepped into the era of rearing a beggarly economy where the citizens are coaxed to accept poverty, never labour to make a living, but wait to be paid N5000 every month, although that is still in campaign propaganda and never implemented. But if that holds, though at variance with President Muhammadu Buhari’s defence sometime that the campaign promise wasn’t his, rather that of the APC, then we would have arrived at the point of no return in managing poverty and hardship.

Some days ago in the week, a radio made the schools feeding programme a major matter of discussion. The two lady presenters were so excited that they eulogized the project and did their best to antagonize all callers that spoke about it in the contrary. They canvassed all manner of defence, including that the project creates jobs for the cooks and food vendors. Really?

I asked myself, between feeding school kids and providing schools adequate equipment and learning facilities, which would add more value, even in job creation?

I still wonder why and how jobs would not be created if the FG channels that feeding effort to rebuilding the dilapidated school blocks because the feeding includes those schools where the kids study under trees and in the rain.

If the same government embarks on rebuilding the collapsed structures, providing furniture for the kids that study sitting on bare floor, pay the teachers better, empower them more through training and conducive work environment, equip the laboratories and libraries to make for better quality education, would that cause job losses or creation. I even expect better and more jobs than the canvassed feeding programme.

In good economies, I hear of premium placed on good quality education where the kids’ parents are empowered enough to feed their children. Government elevates the value of education handed the children. That is why even here in Nigeria, the implementers of the same programme don’t have their kids in such schools. They prefer to send their children to schools of quality education and feed them themselves. For the common man, his kids should be fed and no attempt to create liberating possibilities for them to live a better and elevated life and be empowered.

I don’t want to argue on whether the project implementation is as good as what they claim in the news. I rather assume that they are as smooth as announced. So my postulation is that with perfect implementation, it isn’t wiser to impoverish a parent and feed her kids in school. Instead, provide him enabling factors within his economic space and allow her feed her kids?

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I am sure so many parents value their honour and living up to their parental obligation through an economy that provides them the opportunities to grow. As a parent, I for one prefer to cater for my children and live in a country with an economy that provides me enablers to live independently rather than be a beggar to the government. I see this approach as easiest way to deceive a people that all is well and create laziness and laxity.

What has kept Nigeria in retardation this long is the culture of money sharing in Abuja. Every month, states gather in Abuja and share money and go back home to spend it and wait for another round of sharing. That has emasculated creativity, industry and thinking. It has encouraged corruption and desperation for power where jostlers for power have their eyes on the pool of money to be shared. All the brigandage to be in power is actually the tussle to occupy the position of sharer-in-chief of the common wealth.

The same retardant is what the government wants to replicate in the education system where struggling families would be held down forever with the deceit their children are fed in schools and nobody would have the time to ask questions on improving the poor and terrible quality of education the masses get. That poor showing and terrible quality of education is replicated at all the tiers – from primary through tertiary and a government that declared that the latest demand of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is more than the budgetary allocation for the entire education sector, implying scarcity of resources, rather prefers to chase shadows and feed children, hold them down in their mind and make them prisoners of poor quality education.

Where is the justification that the government that doesn’t have enough money to fund education, far below the UN standards of 26% of the budget for education prefers feeding children of the poorer citizens rather than liberating their parents to cater for them?

Those children are aware that they are treated as the helpless by feeding them in school and that their fellow kids from rich families are not fed the same way, thereby ingraining in them the inferiority of the downtrodden class and barring them from raising their heads in the company of those privileged kids.

That is why I ask again, if the policy is so wonderful, why are the kids of these implementing government officials not in those schools?  It is the same trend in the university system where the powerful citizens that refuse to listen to ASUU don’t have their kids in those universities and even if the teachers go on strike for 10 years, its is none of their business. We heard in the past instances where the children of governors that refuse to negotiate with teachers under their care study abroad.

In my primary school days in Imo State, the governor of my state then, Sam Mbakwe had his daughter in a school in UU and the union of teachers released the money he paid for his daughter in a year as more than the wage bill of all the teachers in a month for which they were on strike. When Governor Chinweoke Mbadijunu was in charge in Anambra State, primary and secondary schools were shut for one year or a little less. During that time, news broke that his daughter of 28 years bagged a PhD in medicine in US.

Sometime in July, we all saw photos of Bukola Saraki, Senate President’s son graduation in UK, an emir’s daughter’s graduation in the UK and also the son of Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State in UK.  So with the laudable school kids feeding, where are their children in all these?  Who is actually deceiving us?

My take remains that this project is just glorified almajiri system by a government that prefers to impoverish us, throw crumbs at us and ensure that we never get the kind of environment that would empower us to pick our bills. It is enslavement. It is wrong and it is counterproductive. Provide my child the right incentives to get quality education and leave his feeding to me. Provide the right facilities that would enable her get quality education to liberate her mind and I would be thankful because that is the duty of the government.