It’s a question of priority, and…

Governor of Kano: your state boasts Islamic principles of care for the aged. Yet your elders beg at Sabon Gari junctions. Is this your *ummah*?

Do not insult us with “we don’t have money.”

Abia doesn’t have oil. Abia doesn’t have seaports. Abia doesn’t have the federal largesse you enjoy.

Yet Abia chooses humanity. Abia chooses memory. Abia says: “Those who built this land shall not die forgotten.”

This is not charity. This is justice delayed.

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For decades, our elders paid taxes, raised children, farmed land, taught in schools, and kept faith—only to be discarded like used wrappers when their strength fades. And we watched. We normalised it. We called it “Nigerian hardship.”

But Abia has shattered that lie. Governor Otti did not wait for Abuja. He did not blame inflation. He did not hide behind committees. He looked at his people—his mothers, his fathers—and said: “You deserve dignity.”

So I ask again: Where is your law? If you govern a state collecting billions monthly—as most of you do—then your silence is not oversight. It is moral treason.

To every governor reading this:  Your legacy will not be your flyovers or your new secretariat. It will be how you treated the voiceless. The wrinkled hands that once held this nation together now tremble in hunger while you commission bronze statues of yourselves.

Abia has drawn a line in the sand. On one side: leaders who serve.  On the other: looters who rule.

Choose your side.

Because I am ashamed—not of Nigeria, but of the men who wear power like a stolen ‘agbada’ while our elders sleep hungry.

I AM ASHAMED.

And I end with this: If your state can fund a new governor’s lodge, a fleet of SUVs, or another vanity flyover—yet cannot guarantee food, medicine, and dignity for its elders… then whose blood is on your hands?

By Wahala Reports.

MY COMMENT: There is no doubt that this set of Nigerians is about the most neglected. Worse still is the fact that many of the children that they laboured to educate and hope to depend on at old age cannot find jobs to do years after graduation. So, it is double ‘wahala’ for ‘living body’ which is far worse than the ‘double wahala for ‘dead body’ that Fela sang about decades ago. After all ‘dead body’ is dead; it cannot feel anything again.

I agree it is not a question of lack of money. It is more of priority. This is clear even from the way we treat our pensioners. Until recently, many of them slumped on verification queues, some died in the process.

Another snag, though, is that in a country where many governors have abdicated their responsibility, and rather than their citizens asking them to do the rightful, they simply heap all the blame on the central government or pack their bag and baggage and head for the ‘cities’. Everybody thinks the cities are such big places with an elastic capacity to accommodate all. What we would find ultimately is a situation where many people would bring their aged parents and dump them in the so-called cities for other governments to take care of.

Of course I know some people would say ‘’but the governments in the ‘cities’ are collecting taxes from the citizens there, irrespective of their state of origin. Fine, still, the arrangement would work better if every state government takes responsibility and their people can find something to do within. We will then only have fewer spillovers to the cities, thus making it manageable for the governments there to take care of more elders.

Governor Otti deserves commendation at least for remembering this category of Nigerians who had served the country in their prime. They must not be left to their own devices at old age.