The delayed distribution of Palliatives

LAST week, anger and despair greeted the warehousing and delayed distribution of the  palliatives provided by the Federal Government for distribution to the most vulnerable Nigerians following the unceremonious removal of subsidy on Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on May 29. According to reports, members of the organised labour and Nigerians in general deplored the handling of the palliatives package by the various state governments. Penultimate week, the Federal Government had announced a N185 billion package, translating to N5bn for each of the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja,  for the procurement of food and agricultural inputs to cushion the effects of the recent subsidy removal by the Bola Tinubu administration. While 52 percent of the fund was a grant, 48 percent was a loan. The government also gave five trucks of rice to each state, asking them to purchase 100,000 bags of rice, 40,000 bags of maize and fertiliser to bolster their palliative measures. This week, though, some of the states began the distribution of the palliatives to households, attributing the delay to the Federal Government’s tardiness in providing them with the promised palliatives.

To say the very least, the reports that state governors delayed the sharing of palliatives to the poorest Nigerians, like they did during the COVID-19 crisis, are really disturbing. The impact of subsidy removal, which President Tinubu carried out on May 29 even though there had been provision for subsidy by the outgone Muhammadu Buhari administration till the end of June, was immediate, and so the distribution of the so-called palliatives, which are even grossly insufficient, should have been implemented with dispatch. Initially, the Tinubu government flirted with the idea of distributing N8,000 each per month to the most vulnerable Nigerians but dropped the idea following popular agitation in the polity based essentially on questions around the integrity of the so-called national register of poor Nigerians that the Buhari administration had used to effect its conditional cash transfers.

Now, when the Tinubu government rolled out its so-called palliatives in the middle of August, not a few Nigerians felt that it amounted to a joke given the gross inadequacy. They wondered, and quite rightly too, just how five trucks of rice could be distributed among an entire state. For context, Lagos State has an estimated population of at least 25 million people and if at least half of the population falls among the target population for the palliatives, the N5bn provided by the Federal Government (48 percent of which is still a loan) would amount to only N400 per person. To be sure, there is hardly any state in Nigeria that does not have more than half of its population in abject poverty, and the fact that the Federal Government could perform such a ruse is simply mind-boggling. But worse still, the so-called palliatives were not distributed to the states with dispatch and the states, when eventually they began to receive them, still found convenient excuses to delay their distribution, demonstrating the fact that the political class generally has no interest in the long-suffering, hapless populace trapped in squalor. If a government programme is poorly thought out and horrendously implemented, the result can only be chaos.

The government has not shown any responsibility in this matter at all. It is ridiculous and perplexing that a government that wants to be commended as having undertaken a thoughtful and courageous act by removing petroleum subsidy has been found wanting in attending to the fallouts of its decision on the people. Almost three months after the peremptory decision, the Federal Government and the state governments are still embroiled in the usual back and forth on the distribution of the so-called palliatives to the people. In any case, is the distribution of palliatives not an acknowledgment of the fact that the decision has unwittingly turned the country into a huge Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp where residents are divorced from dignified sources of economic reproduction and have to be provided with the rudiments of life, unable to make ends meet on their own?

Is it in this kind of distressing and dehumanizing situation that the various state governments should still be found to be hoarding and not transparently distributing the provided palliatives? We do not think that the various governments appreciate the depth of the privations that Nigerians are currently experiencing. We urge them to consider the dangers inherent in continually pushing the citizenry to the wall with their insensitive and thoughtless actions. Those in charge of the distribution of the paltry palliatives should quickly adjust to the need to do this promptly and transparently to help defuse the gathering tension associated with the deleterious effects of subsidy removal. The Federal Government and state governments cannot continue to add to the distress in the land.

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