Ramadan Feeding as Gift of Fish

Iwill not be surprised if some folks in Kano and other far Northern states already think of this year's Ramadan period as the biblical Seven Years of Plenty. At the weekend, President of Dangote Group Alhaji Aliko Dangote, reputed to be the richest person in Africa having long displaced Harry Oppenheimer, flagged off the distribution of 120,000 bags of rice to one million underprivileged persons in the 44 local government councils of his native Kano State.

Dangote estimated the cost of the food items he procured for distribution throughout the country at N15 billion. Kano alone would receive 120,000 bags while the rest would go to the country's remaining LGAs, about 730 of them. The purpose, he said, is to provide immediate relief to those in need. Kano was chosen to flag off the program, he said, because of its large population and high level of poverty. This is in addition to his group's daily feeding programme for 10,000 vulnerable people in Kano State which has been running since 1990,

Dangote said.

Kano State Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, who received the food, called on other wealthy individuals in the state to emulate the gesture. Tens of thousands of them all over the region are doing that already, but the pressure must be mounting on all other persons who are wealthy or thought to be wealthy to also embark on Ramadan feeding programs, or else they may have their food stores and food trucks looted on the highways. Everybody says Ramadan is a costly period and millions of people need help to get by. I sometimes wonder about this claim because during Ramadan, adult and healthy Muslims do not eat or drink for up to 14 hours a day. Logically, when we do not eat for all those hours, I thought our food budget should drop. Instead, it goes up astronomically because people more than make up with elaborate and sumptuous dishes for what they missed during the day, hence the urgent cry for assistance.

Seven Northern state governments upped the ante this year by spending a reported N28 billion on Ramadan feeding. Katsina, Sokoto, Kano, Jigawa, Kebbi, Niger and Yobe together spent this tidy sum to provide Ramadan food to their citizens. The amounts varied, from champion feeder Katsina State's N10bilion to Sokoto State's N6.7 billion, Kano State's N6 billion, Jigawa's N2.83 billion, Kebbi's N1.5 billion, Niger's N976 million and Yobe State's N178 million. Population size had something to do with the variation, though not wholly so, because Katsina's population is smaller than Kano's but it budgeted nearly twice as much. Sokoto's population is only slightly larger than Kebbi's but it voted five times as much. No doubt many other Northern states also embarked on Ramadan feeding, only that I could not lay my hands on the figures.

One of the problems with these kinds of programs is that once one state government starts it, other governors will come under severe pressure to do a similar thing, even when they have doubts about its utility. In the North things tend to spread like wildfire, such as when Zamfara State Governor Ahmed Sani started the Shari'a project

MAHMUDJEGA