Edo 2024: The Practical Value of Asue Ighodalo’s Manifesto
Chris Ojeikere
The most exciting part of Asue Ighodalo’s Manifesto is the utilitarian tenor of the document. It offers solutional services in real simple terms, and that, on its own, inspires great hope in readers’ minds! It reminds one of the Edo parable of the hopeful hunger. The parable rightly observes that a hopeful hunger can do no fatal damage, because ‘Hope’ inexorably resists its threats.
Asue Ighodalo’s Manifesto certainly offers practicable action plans and realistic possibilities.
Let us examine some of them. The most important topic to the average Nigerian today is hunger! Hunger is an existential threat. It has the potential to kill immediately, or in the long run, through malnutrition and other hunger acquired diseases. How to tackle hunger in the land is therefore the common subject matter of discussion among average Nigerians.
Higher levels Agricultural theories and investments are too far away to help the hungry, and for that matter, angry citizen. Asue Ighodalo knows this and offers a very practical focus to ameliorating immediate hunger of Edo people in his Manifesto of Prosperity!
Asue Ighodalo would immediately focus on local food production; encouraging local farmers with critical fund intervention that would help to expand their farms and increase farm yields. One such major intervention would be to execute his Food Loss and Waste (FLOW) policy. That would greatly reduce if not eradicate food loss after harvest. Farmers will then produce without fear; which can triple food produce supply to our market in one year. That will ensure local food sufficiency and help to check food prices. More than those, it will incentivise people’s interest in farming food crops, because the fear of losing the surplus has been removed by the policy. Once people can afford food to eat, Prosperity has then begun!
Anyone, who knows anything about why our local food supply has dropped drastically in our markets will appreciate Dr Ighodalo’s simple solution to a long and protracted problem. I have been told of heaps of plantains perishing in Ovia forests and huge numbers of pineapple bulbs and other fruits wasting away in forests in Edo Central , because farmers could not handle post harvest challenges.
Similarly, in health care, the sister of food sufficiency, Asue Ighodalo meticulously meets the rural and poor sick people at their point of needs by providing mobile medical clinics that would hasten emergency attention to them. This is a simple, but high impact value addition to rural medicare. In the same vein, there will be funds incentives to keep qualified medical personnel in the rural areas to provide quality services to rural folks. They don’t have to come to Benin before they meet quality personnel or care. Just as heart warming is the fact also, that the
elderly and the physically disadvantaged will find reprieve in Asue Ighodalo’s free health care for them, as well as provision of wheel chairs, prosthetics and other enabling aids to the challenged! .
Again, market women will not be left out of the kind intervention to grow their business through intervention funds by the Asue Ighodalo’s regime come November, 2024, by God’s grace. They will be given small grants to expand their businesses.
A highly commendable value discovery, rather than addition, that Dr Asue Ighodalo highlights on his Manifesto is the policy of investing in the economy of the informal sector. Even though the informal sector: food vendors, petty traders, artisans, SMEs generally, accounts for about 70% size of our economy, yet for some strange reasons, they have not been given essential attention. But Asue Ighodalo is beaming his developmental light their way, by way of offering them conditional repayable grants to improve their business linearly and professionally. Gone would soon be the days when we have to import artisans from Cotonou or elsewhere before we can set up a descent looking POP in our houses! Also, it goes without saying that expanded SMEs would take in more hands as apprentices and thereby helping to depopulate the unemployment market.
All of the foregoing conduce to well being that eventually translate to a productive society and Prosperity. Asue Ighodalo’s Manifesto is Prosperity Made Easy!
