In the early days of this month, Mmesoma Joy Ejikeme, the 19-year old Anambra State-born candidate of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) in the 2023 examination, took the nation on what eventually emerged a huge merry-go-round. She took on JAMB and insisted that the examination body did an injustice to her by not naming her the highest scorer in the 2023 UTME. The commotion she ignited was of no mean stature.
Professors and top-range academics joined the different camps. Some were defenders of her rights, some became ethnic jingoists and others queried the veracity of the data she presented.
Data is crucial to life. But data is also an ass. The fidelity of the process by which it was gathered testifies to what it turns into. Process is crucial as those in the law-making process and law-interpretation process would tell you. You will hear that the law is vital but the process of making it is more crucial than the law. Because data is critical and we are all obsessed with interpreting what it portends, we easily got on the Mmesoma JAMBoree.
Only a few chose to stand hands akimbo and watch where the drama was headed. Even JAMB had to look at itself twice. It’s like a situation when you abuse somebody by saying ‘look at his mouth.’ he is tempted to look at himself in the mirror. It took JAMB some time to come out boldly that the 362 score Mmesoma posed with, different from the original 249 mark she scored in JAMB, was fake. Thank God, the organisation was able to rise above the snake-swallowing-money saga and earn our respect, thanks to the government of Anambra State, which instituted a panel to investigate that matter. And when Mmesoma completed her rounds of JAMBoree, the saga can only answer to the biblical preacher in Ecclesiastes who declares: “vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
As soon as the Mmesoma saga started dying down, the Federal Government made good its promise to release palliatives to cushion the effects of the removal of subsidy from premium motor spirit, petrol.
It’s something that can easily pass for cash rain on the land. There is N500 billion for palliatives, out of which some 12 million Nigerians will benefit to the tune of N8,000 for six months; N185 billion to fix roads impacted by flood; 192bn to fix farmlands destroyed by flooding; N70 for members of the National Assembly; N35bn for the National Judicial Commission(NJC) and N10bn for special projects of the Federal Capital Territory. On paper, it looks like something people can jump at, just that I will caution that in a society that is full of the more you look, the less you see, those who want to jump for joy need to watch the ground under their feet.
Are we in for another jamboree? We need to ask. While the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari ran its course, a battery of goodwill items surfaced in the policy papers and were ‘implemented’ to the letter. What that government called National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) gulped something in the region of $8bn in eight years. The determination of the administration was to use the SIP to push 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years.
The programme had four components including the N-Power programme; Homegrown School Feeding Programme (HGSFP); Conditional Cash Transfer(CCT) and the Government Enterprises Entrepreneurship Programme (GEEP) but after they had been diligently implemented and we even had some components added, rather than lift 100 million persons out of poverty, through the National Poverty Reduction with Growth Strategy (NPRGS), more than that number have sunk into excruciating poverty.
My biblical book of reference, Ecclesiastes says “The eye is not satisfied of seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” So, now that we’ve heard of the Tinubu palliative proposal, have we seen its implementation? Some would caution. But what we have seen before tells us not to stand by and watch. Data is crucial, I will say again, and data will drive the implementation of the N500 billion palliatives. Earlier in July, a 19-year-old took the nation on a jolly ride by turning data upside down. How do you gather data to reach 12 million Nigerians who would get the N8, 000 monthly package? Who will cure the mischief of the data man in the process of implementation? Some knowledgeable policy analysts say that policies fail because as they are written, the writer inserts his or her own mischief. If the implementor wants to be sincere, he overlooks that mischief. Most of the time, that is not done.
Some years back, officials of the NSIP office hosted a media parley where they told us they had a foolproof Social investment register from each of the states and that the register captured the “poorest of the poor.” We told them such a register cannot withstand stress tests. Can that office publish the details and phone numbers of the beneficiaries on a site that we can assess? No, they said and we all knew it was just one of those high-sounding government projects that would signify nothing. Were they to prove our pessimism wrong, we would have seen the National Bureau of Statistics celebrating the lifting of some 90 million Nigerians out of poverty. That has not happened as we speak.
Shall we embark on another JAMBoree? We shouldn’t and this should not be another jamboree really. The new government should study the data used by the Buhari government, and avoid a situation where some persons just sit down in a corner of their offices to juggle names or we have a situation where the gorilla would swallow the cash.
The ideal is to find a system that can work in our environment.
The less we expose government officials who will handle this to physical cash, the better. But then, the real poorest of the poor don’t have bank accounts. Not long ago, we were told only 20 of the 44 local governments of Kano State have banks. That is the scenario in say 35 states of Nigeria. So, the warning is rife for the powers that be as seen in Ecclessiastices 1:9: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.”
