Rivers’ Poverty Enhancement
Programme (RIVAPEP)
By Odimegwu Onwumere
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| author |
If the members of Keke Owners and
Riders Association of Nigeria (KORAN), Rivers
State branch, knew that they would be
losing their job today, they would not have pleaded with Governor Chibuike
Amaechi of Rivers
State to call his aides
to order over the unremitting harassment of them in November, 2009. In that
year, Samuel Vidoh, secretary of KORAN and Dickson Nyemaichechukwu, Public
Relations Officer (PRO), expressed this discontentment.
The special task force on
motorcycles’ operation, set up in that year by the Special Adviser to Amaechi
on Traffic, Mr. Roland Odoyi, made sure that tricycles were seized by the task
force’s operatives. There was the claim that the ban on commercial motorcycles,
also affected the tricycles. As the battle raged on between KORAN and the task
force, the former expressed its dignity, of being different from the banned
commercial motorcycle operators.
What was meted out to KORAN in 2009
could be termed as a tap on the back compared to the total ban of this
initiative of the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) in streets of Port Harcourt today.
And it seems that there would be no
amount of plea from the group with Amaechi that he would come to their aid in
order to end this shamefaced harassment that would keep them in the court of
poverty in the state pending when most of them would find job.
The government forgot that the Keke
operators had been in no less way helping to easing transportation problems in
the Amaechi’s (indigenous) state. Would the Rivers State Traffic Management
Authority (TIMA-RIV) do its job now as its once “sworn enemies” are out of the
road? Would the controller of TIMA – Riv, General Nelson Jaja, now have a
rest? Would Rivers
State come to limelight
with the ban? Even though these organizations and the government could be
resting saying that they have won the battle, the essence of this ban could be
further described as “Rivers’
Poverty Enhancement Programme (RIVAPEP).”
Many people are going to be jobless
in a Rivers State due to the ban of Keke, a state
where building of industries is seen as sacrosanct.
As the ban was
said to help the streets of Port Harcourt, is
there any Planning Commission in Rivers
State that would look
into the abysmal plight these Keke men are going to face? Do we know that
joblessness also breads militancy and other societal vices? Though nobody
solicits for this, but it is true.
One wonders the
efforts of the Rivers
State government towards
alleviating poverty with the ban of the Keke NAPEP that gave over five thousand
people jobs in the state. Is the government telling us today that the Keke
NAPEP initiative is no longer useful because NAPEP removed its hand from
managing it in 2009?
Just like on
February 18, 2009, when the Senate consented its committee on National
Planning, Economic Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, headed by Zaynab Kure, to
carry out a comprehensive investigation into the activities of the agency, did
the Rivers State Assembly mandate any fact-finding committee to look into the
accusations against Keke riders of road improprieties before Keke NAPEP was
banned in Port Harcourt?
As things are
done, the committee the Senate set embarked on a fact-finding visitation to 36
states of the federation and Abuja, examining all the programmes entered upon
by the agency between 2001 and 2009, but the government of Rivers State might
have thought that this idea was useless even though that it was in court with
KORAN. Did the court give its final verdict on who should ride and who should
run before this ban?
It was an
oversight to ban Keke in the streets of Port
Harcourt on mere assumption of road abuse of the
operatives since there was no committee set up by the government that found the
operators wanting.
This ban would
further cause irregularities in the management of people in Rivers State
whose lives and livelihood depended on the operation of the tricycles coupled
with the numerical number of jobless people we already had.
It is dangerous
and bad that tricycles were banned in Port Harcourt
thus preventing the less privileged from benefiting and living in Port Harcourt. However,
it didn’t come as a surprise because somebody once said, when Okada was banned
in 2009, that Rivers
State is not for the
poor. Perhaps, the person who said this derives joy in seeing people suffer
more beyond their rich. And this has made a lot of non-indigenes go back to their
villages of origin instead of die unsung in Port Harcourt City
(The Treasure of the Nation?).
This was
happening because there was no contract agreement between the government and
the masses; if there is, no one thinks that any government could wake-up in the
morning, decide, implement and impose any heinous or harmonious decision on the
masses even when such decision is evil.
The ban of
tricycles in Port Harcourt
is characterised by manipulations of the rights of the people. This choice is
irregularity manifesting against the people by the government for puerile
distribution of governance even at the expense of the people.
The government
should always reach an understanding and operational guidelines with the people
in all its endeavours instead of operating largely without recourse to set
rules. The government should not always use its influence to approve for itself
directly laws that could favour it alone. The people should always be
considered before certain laws are taken. Let decisions that government makes
be for poverty alleviation, not for poverty alienation. Government should stop
spending issues of the masses on political matters. It is not always good that
Keke NAPEP initiative was introduced to lessen poverty in the land, yet failure
of leadership of the agency and high level manipulations of the operators by
the government is now cultivating the obverse.
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