Jumoke Bamigboye, District Governor of Rotary Club
Government at all levels have been tasked to embrace the Rotary four-way test in all its dealings and embark on needs assessment across communities in order to identify the core area of needs before allocating projects in order to make greater impact, instead of engaging in arbitrary distribution of projects.
The first female District Governor of Rotary Club for the year 2020/2021, District 9125 comprising of 23 states and the Federal Capital Territory (all states in the north and all the states in the South-West except Lagos and Ogun State), Mrs Jumoke Bamigboye, made the call in Ibadan on Monday during an inspection tour of the projects carried out by the club in Oyo State.
She stated that the “government can learn from Rotary’s four-way test. The four-way test covers all that we do; whatever you want to say, is it the truth? If it is the truth, is it fair to all concerned? If it is fair, will it yield goodwill and better friendships? And finally, will it be beneficial to all concerned.
“Now on the first one, is it the truth? Most of the things government does are not based on truth, some of the contractors are not even truthful about it, they will just go to a governor and say this community needs school, just because they want to make money.
“If we stop extorting and thinking about ourselves first, the government will begin to look at what communities need, then they will be able to do projects that will not be useless and abandoned.”
Bamigboye noted that impact of governance was lost on several communities despite the number of projects being turned out across the country, said the society continued to suffer as a result of deficit of truth and commitment in projects’ allocation as well as execution, adding that, ‘before we do any project in a community at Rotary, we would first go to do Community Needs Assessment to find out what they really need and not what we want to give them.
“Government might just go and do a project in a community and it might not really be what the people need. At the end of the day, it would be abandoned. We don’t do that. When somebody needs something dearly and you give the person, he or she holds it dearly.
“When we came in, we did not envisage that there would be a pandemic. Every year in Rotary Club, we come up with a theme. This year’s theme is ‘Rotary opens opportunities.’ This is the time that the world needs Rotary the most and we cannot sit back. We say one of the ways to fight the COVID-19 pandemic is by washing of hands. The question is what do we say of communities where there is no hygienic water supply? We then came up with what we call water is life to give communities water and we gave them sanitizers and facemasks.”
During her visit to the state, the District Governor commissioned projects in some communities which include renovation and provision of classrooms for a state school, provision of computer laboratory for another school, provision of school furniture, provision of COVID 19 prevention kits to schools and distribution of palliatives.
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