FEATURE ARTICLE

Friday, April 17, 2020
[email protected]
Arizona, USA
MR. PRESIDENT, HUNGER IS DEADLIER THAN COVID-19!

r. President, we have raptly and carefully listened to your recent address to the nation aired live on Monday, April 13, 2020.

Your presidential message to the nation was bureaucratic, aspirational and substantive in presentation. But Mr. President, with every sense of respect, your presidential address to the nation was respectively meaningless to empty stomachs in Ekiti, Abakaliki, Kuje, Oyo town, Enugu, Ikire, Abeokuta, Sokoto, Maiduguri, Sapele, and other rustic and impoverished areas in Nigeria. The two weeks extension of stay-at-home from your address with no meaningful palliative measures known to hungry people is a social time bomb!

In your national address, this salient point is being extracted for your muse and perusal:

"In the past two weeks, we announced palliative measures such as food distribution, cash transfers and loans repayment waivers to ease the pains of our restrictive policies during this difficult time. These palliatives will be sustained."

Mr. President, these palliative measures as mentioned in your address are not being massively felt in all geopolitical climes of Nigeria. The sustenance of the palliative measures are very good but questionable to hungry stomachs in the slum areas. These famished stomachs are going to take your aspirational address with a pinch of salt!

Other universal and medical precautions espoused in your address are inconsequential to hungry and empty stomachs. A hungry man is a complete angry man when he has no other alternative to meet his physiological needs (needs for basic food intake for survival)!

Mr. President, please, take a moment to listen to your kinsmen and the aggrieved man in the viral video clips. The unlettered man in the viral video clip seems a spokesperson for millions of hungry people in Nigeria. Your government is sitting on a lethal keg of gunpowder. People are hungry. Hunger could be deadlier than Coronavirus. You must act fast and fast NOW in the interest of a hungry nation and helpless impoverished masses. Your government must avoid the Hobbesian state where life is short, brutish and nasty! People have already been pauperized by a country flowing with milk and honey. Please, Mr. President, do something extraordinarily palliative NOW to meet and feed the growing number of disquieting and empty stomachs in Nigeria.

Thanks in anticipation as you weigh this honest admonition from an unrepentant Buharist!

Yours faithfully,

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