Tag: #Agba Jalingo

There is an African proverb amongst royalty that says that, “it is the one who wants to suffer for the people that accept the heavy weight of royal beads.”

And truly speaking, royal beads are many and very heavy. Not just heavy in terms of responsibility but physically when measured on a scale. A complete set of royal dressing includes not just the beads but also several age long metals that carry a lot of weight on the scale. Part of the idea is to constantly remind the carrier of the huge responsibility he or she bears.

With all its envied privileges, royalty confers even greater responsibility and denial. Because to lead, is to be in a position of advantage, in the first place amongst equals. To be a pathway, a leading light and bridge for others into a new destination; holding them by the hand to find their way from ignorance; shining as an example for them to follow.

Talking about new destinations, if I were to be a leader, I would endeavour to build on the good things my predecessors did by thinking out new and improved methods of doing those same things for the good of the people.

Assuming that my predecessors many years ago, bought hoes and cutlasses for our people who are predominantly farmers, Me, their new King, should be able to move it further and introduce our people to modern farming tools, to boost resources utilization and yield per hectare, as well as expanding economic opportunities. If they were given fishing nets, can we now explore the chances of giving them fishing boats?

Bringing it down to political leadership, if our leaders distributed Okada to our people 20 years ago, dug boreholes for our people 20 years ago, distributed generators for our people 20 years ago, gathered our people under canopies and trees for health outreaches 20 years ago, campaigned with wrappers and rice, 20 years ago, etc, after two decades, isn’t there any new thinking to improve on, modify or do away with these methods after such a long period? Are we so bereft of innovating new initiatives to improve on executing these same programs by employing new ways of doing things? Or is there a deliberate ploy to perpetuate our state of being 20 years ago?

The budget figures are scaling up yearly and changing rapidly, can the methods of implementing these budgets also change along? Can we intentionally decide to improve on our governance processes and discard this copy and paste model? Is our goal to develop our communities or just to share power? Can these thrones survive by keeping the people down perpetually?

If the King must lead and enjoy the perquisites of the throne, he must not forfeit the sacrifice of appeasement, lest he falls.

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

Disclaimer: The opinion expressed in this article is strictly that of the author, Agba Jalingo, and does not represent TheLumineNews, its agent or the organization the author works for.

I commend Citizen Agba Jalingo for his unrelenting efforts in ensuring that our National Assembly members are accountable to the people whose mandates they hold on trust. By highlighting projects facilitated into the budget by them, he is not only equipping the people with more information on the activities of their representatives but also promoting the efforts of lawmakers.

However, we must also sensitize our citizens to know that appearance of projects in the budget does not translate to funding of the project. This is important to avoid a situation where we’ll begin to harass our lawmakers for projects that the executive arm is yet to fund. The legislative arm only has appropriation power and not the authority to fund/execute projects.

Currently, Nigeria is unusually running more than one budget. The 2024 budget is now running concurrently with the 2025 budget even though so many projects there are yet to be funded. Even though we expect that the Nass members who nominated these projects will follow up and lobby relevant authorities to ensure contracts are awarded and funded, people should be educated on where their power end.

Also, some privileged Cross Riverians who are working in offices where they can make case for the funding of these items should help. The Nass members definitely need the support of everybody to ensure that their vision for these projects are actualized.

I commend Honourable Peter Akpanke and Godwin Offiono for the overwhelming number of projects they’ve facilitated into the budget for their respective constituencies. As first timers and opposition lawmakers, this is a huge statement of intent. I encourage them to take their efforts further by lobbying to ensure that the projects are funded and executed.

Once again, bravo Citizen Agba!

Inyali Peter, Ph.D.

The first time I heard the phrase, “Matthew effect”, was from the lips of Professor Sofie Oluwoye of blessed memory. She used the phrase in one of her conversations on the uneven power relations between Africa and the West. Yesterday, Kelechi Deca, reminded me of that phrase again, when he dropped it as a comment under one of my facebook posts about our judiciary.

But it is actually sociologists, Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman, who coined the phrase in their 1971 book, “Patterns of Evaluation In Science: Institutionalization, Structure and Functions of the Referee System.”

The sociologists who authored the phrase, also lifted their coinage from Jesus’s Parable of the Talents, recorded in Matthew 25:29 and Luke 19:26 “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.”

The phrase is now generally used to describe the situation where those who have, continue to get more, while those who do not have, continue to grow poorer. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. A phenomenon where those who start with an advantage tend to accumulate more of that advantage over those who do not have the same advantage.

It is an existential truism that, privileged people seldom give up their privileges or even want to share them. They wish the rest well, only to the extent that their reserved privileges are not threatened. It seems to be the intrinsic nature of us wherever we have an advantage over others.

The good news however is that, while some people came with their own advantage from birth and never have to bother about life’s vicissitudes, others too have the space to strive and create their own advantage and perhaps extend it to their own future generations.

Remember that, to achieve that goal in this rat race, you must avoid being like the servant who did not use his talents that the master gave them before traveling. The one who buried his latents and returned it to the master. That is the one that got poorer, after his unused talents were taken from him and added to those who used their own.

Be like the servants who used their own talents in the manner that impressed their master. Remember they were rewarded with more, including taking from the poorer to give to them. Don’t suffer from the Matthew effect. Learn from the Matthew effect.

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

Disclaimer:  The opinion expressed in this article is strictly that of the author, Agba Jalingo, and does not represent TheLumineNews, its agent or the organization the author works for.

The government is essentially saddled with the responsibility of fixing things. The task of bringing closure to teething issues. The onus of finding permanent solutions to problems. The burden of developing our communities and the duty of securing the citizens.

It is charities and not-for-profit organizations, as well as philanthropy, that support the government with palliatives to augment societal challenges. Even when there are emergencies, government’s immediate intervention with palliatives is usually a stop gap expediency to ameliorate conditions before bringing a permanent solution.

But when people in government take up the duty of charities, NGOs and philanthropists, and abandon the core duties of governance, there is no way society will grow. Such dereliction only ensures that society continues to deteriorate as time goes by. Let me elucidate further.

Boreholes for instance, are emergency sources of water for non permanent residential camps, like Internally Displaced Persons IDP or refugee camps, etc. They are not permanent solutions or replacements for pipe borne water supply. The goal and duty of government is to connect remote communities and sub-urban areas with reticulated pipes and supply clean treated water to homes.

And this is not a tall order. We have always had water-works from where clean water was reticulated to our homes. The last two decades of democracy, instead of modernizing and expanding the water supply facilities, has wrecked almost all of them and leaders have resorted to siting borehole in hamlets and clapping for the inanity. The truth is that what water is needed for, both in our homes, industries and agriculture, boreholes are a far cry and government has to become intentional about rebuilding permanent solutions to the supply of water.

The same thing applies to solar street lights. Those are just rechargeable lamps strapped to aluminum poles and straddled along our streets. They only last a couple of months. They can’t bring development. They can’t power a clipper or a hair dryer or a vulcanizing or welding machine. Our communities need electricity and there are different sources and models of generating power nowadays and communities with municipal governments around the globe have taken self help initiatives to solve their power supply issues. The law in Nigeria also now supports both individuals, companies and governments at all levels to generate power.

What of health outreaches? Our leaders are now making it look as though the health of the people can be taken care of in few days of community health outreaches. That’s tokenism. Those were activities that were hitherto organized by NGOs and supported by international donor agencies. It is more sustainable to revamp and equip our primary health centers and ensure supply of essential drugs to the health centers. Fix our decrepit general hospitals and have our population on year round health insurance packages. But hell no, our politicians have chosen the short path of out racing themselves in who gathered the highest number of old men and women in one football field in the village for three days, in the name of health outreach.

I can go on and on and on. Instead of leveraging on technology and community cooperation to open up motorable roads, they prefer to supply bikes and keke, to cut-off and abandoned communities. But what is even more disheartening is that our people are clapping and calling them capacity leaders. But how do you blame the people? If you haven’t experienced good governance before in your life time, how do you know what is bad governance?

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

Disclaimer: The opinion expressed in this article is strictly that of the author, Agba Jalingo, and does not represent TheLumineNews, its agent or the organization the author works for.

If you are from Cross River North, kindly come with me. There is something important which you may already know but may not have given thought to, that I want to put in context for you.

Do you know that by land mass, all the five local governments that make up Cross River North, put together, are smaller than Akamkpa LGA? That means the Chairman of Akamkpa LGA is ruling over a land space bigger than the one ruled by the five LGA Chairmen of Northern Cross River, combined.

Ogoja is 972 km². Yala LGA has an area of 1,739 km². Obudu is 591.7km². Obanlikwu is 1,057km². And Bekwarra LGA is 306km². All the five combined, sum up to 4,665.7km². Akamkpa LGA alone has a land area of 5,049km². That means Akamkpa is bigger than the whole Cross River North by 383.3km². The remainder is still bigger than Bekwarra LGA. That also means Akamkpa alone is bigger than the entire Lagos State, which has a meagre land area of just 3,475 km².

Cross River North, however has a combined population of 1,116,700 people out of a total population of 4.406million for the whole State. That’s 25.3 percent of the State population. Between July to September (third quarter, 2024), from official FG documents, the five LGAs of Cross River North, also received net allocation totalling N5,349,067,043 from FAAC, excluding internally generated revenues.

So, 1,116,700 people, living within 4,664.7km square of land, were allocated N5.34billion in three months from FAAC. If you multiply this by four quarters of the year, that’s over N20billion. This is excluding internally generated revenues. Let’s also look at the constituency development funds allocated to Cross River North, through our federal lawmakers which also run into hundreds of millions of Naira. We have one Senator and two House of Reps members.

Looking ahead, let us project positively that this financial routine will repeat itself or even perform better and Cross River North will within the next 12 months, get say 30billion in remittances from both FAAC, IGR and Federal Constituency Development Funds, let us also assume that the encumbrances that used to swallow up LG allocations have been torpedoed by the Supreme Court judgment, is it not time to begin to ask questions about where these monies will be spent?

With this volume of resources, entering a space smaller than Akamkpa LGA, there is no tenable reason why our leaders cannot rebuild our water works instead of drilling boreholes, why they can’t give us electricity instead of rechargeable lamps they call street lights, why they can’t give us health insurance and equip our Primary Health centers, instead of three days health outreaches, why they can’t give us motorable roads, instead of bikes and kekes, why they can’t ensure food security instead of sharing rice and noddles and handouts? why they can’t give children free basic education instead of driving kids away from schools over illegal levies.

Comparatively, there is no reason why Cross River North should not be ahead of other parts of Cross River State and that should perturb our leaders who seem more concerned now about their personal egos and retention of power than the gruelling conditions of our people.

We just lost the golden opportunity of changing the fortunes of the North as the last eight years were blown away by our brother. The people who told us they were stepping in to rescue us should know that we will also hold them to account. They didn’t promise the people that they will step in and fight themselves. They didn’t tell us there were stepping in to divide and rule and hoodwink us. The people of the North know how to ask questions at the right time, and we will ask if the work is not done.

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

Disclaimer: The opinion expressed in this article is strictly that of the author, Agba Jalingo, and does not represent TheLumineNews, its agent or the organization the author works for