By Ishaya Ibrahim, News Editor
The global internet community woke up to the news that Murtala Gwarmai, a senior special assistant on youth development to the Kano State governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, “empowered” some youths in his constituency with donkeys.
Gwarmai has joined other politicians who provide non-skill empowerment to their people amid publicity.
Empowerment in the reckoning of many, should be skill-based with tools provided to get one started.
Ganduje had before the 2019 election provided tea stuff to enable youths start tea business in Kano. Among the stuff he provided some of the youths included: Tea bags, sugar, noodles and eggs. There was no training on book keeping, packaging, expansion and the other business growth strategies.
In Benue State, Governor Samuel Ortom has also been credited for providing wheel barrows to farmers. Many wondered why quality access roads could not be provided for the farming communities to make transportation of their food harvest cheap and speedy.
One Benue politician was also shown gifting goats to his people as empowerment programme.
@mj2starr tweeted: “That is how they keep subjecting their people to the low standard of 1814 so they can buy them with a grain of rice and beans…See Ganduje too, the same youth employment program with tea and indomie,” he said.
@lugandium tweeted: “Westerners and southerners need to understand that as hilarious as this might seem, it is actually a very big deal for northerners, you won’t understand until you’ve lived in the north. The problem is just that the northern elites and politicians are not modernising these things.”
@TroubleMan01 replied him: “So you’re trying to make us accept this as something we should accept in 2020 or what exactly is this tweet?”
