Recently, there has been a lot of groups springing up in response to poverty, starvation and numerous problems in Nigeria. Many of these groups seek both government and private assistance in providing amenities for the poor, hungry, jobless and other suffering people in the society. While some of the agencies are genuinely committed to the eradication of social problems, others use it as business. The dubious charity organizations hope the situation gets worse as they collaborate with media to attract government and private benefactors. A woman fronts a charity motherless babies’ home from which she has obtained lots of personal funds for her family.
Richard Dowden decried the backstabbing effect of some aid agencies when he notes that:
“These aid agencies appoint attractive young women, celebrities, rock singers, film stars to appear on TV in the hot zones, dramatizing their empathy in front of camera in order to raise more income for the agencies. ‘Saving African babies’ is now new business, but it has also become a point from which the rest of the world view Africa.”[1]
In the pre-colonial era, the ethnic communities organized their citizens and resources for productivity and common good. A British chancellor noted that there weren’t beggars in the African societies. Unfortunately, when the colonialists were leaving they handed over access to communities’ resource rights to regional and later central government. This handover was to ensure the continued cheap sale of mineral resources to the colonial masters’ foreign industries. Today, different communities are lumped up under single state, district or constituency officials for getting and sharing resource funds from central government and commercial allies.
The present form of social organization in Nigeria creates and maintains very few positions with access to all resources in the country. The access to resources of different peoples are tied to a single position and disseminated through fewer channels. It is not about few lucky people in the positions, but few positions meant to justify and assist exploitation of the whole. Some of these lucky people fought their individual battles to get one of the few positions of access.
[1] cf. Richard Dowden, op. Cit. p8