‘The country is hard, but it’s harder on the poor’

During separate chats with two of our respondents already featured on this page, Abdullahi Garba and Muhammad Umari mentioned a particular person who has been helping them pay their rent.

According to Garba, this Deltan has been footing the bills of his accommodation for the past 10 years he has been in Warri without fail for free.

Moved by this revelation, our correspondent went in search of the man, Mr Sotu Oris Agbeyegbe, who is a distributor to several biscuits companies across the country.

In a chat with Agbeyegbe, he explained how and why he was motivated to render help to destitute folks from the North despite their geographical, cultural and religious differences.

Agbeyegbe would not shy away from narrating how he struggled while growing up as a young Deltan who had lost his father to the cold hands of death early in life.

He explained that the hardship he experienced as a child and young adult, perhaps, made him develop a soft spot for the handicapped and underprivileged in the popular Hausa Quarters in Warri, Delta State.

Hear him: My name is Sotu Oris Agbeyegbe. I’m from Udu Local Government Area, Delta State. I grew up in the ghetto.

“I lost my father when I was in Primary Six. My mother struggled by herself to bring us up.

“I stopped school because of Five Naira when I was in Senior Secondary School (SSS) One in 1988.

“I think the soft spot I have towards these disabled persons is as a result of the suffering I experienced while I was growing up.

“After I finished my secondary school, I went into tailoring. I was doing the tailoring when I met my wife who advised me to join her in her biscuit business which I did.

“From there, God opened doors for us and we became distributors of biscuits from different companies.

“I have my own house, and another one in the village, I have a warehouse that is full of biscuits.

“There was a day when a car hit one of the cripples and the tyre of his wheelchair got damaged and I asked the driver to go and I helped fix it.

“I can’t help everybody, so I help the ones my spirit directs me to.

“When I met Abdullahi Garba, he was sleeping in front of people’s stores in the night even though he had two wives in the North.

“I just felt it in my spirit to do something for him and I rented a bedsitter of N77,000 monthly for him.

“They are nice people. It’s just the situation of things that conditioned them.

“When I did my mother’s burial, I was surprised to see all of them there. They came to the burial in Isoko all the way from Warri and I was so grateful for that gesture.

“They also graced my occasion when I celebrated my wife’s birthday.

Agbeyegbe bemoaned the economic woes of the country, wondering how destitute beggars are able to cope when well-to-do individuals are also finding it difficult to survive.

“The country is hard, but it’s harder on the poor. The economy is difficult for people like us too because products are adding prices on a daily basis.

“I don’t like how the country is going. I like the country more when Goodluck Jonathan was in power.

“That time, the economy was good. There were some trucks of biscuits we bought at the rate of four million naira and made N400,000 profit.

“But now, that same product has gone up to N25 million and we are not even making up to N600,000 profit.

“So it’s really difficult. And this is as a result of the increase in the fuel price.

“I want to tell the government to set aside some money from the revenue we generate from crude oil specifically for the handicapped and underprivileged in the society,” he admonished.

Ebenezer Adurokiya