AN APPEAL TO PRIORITISE ESA DEVELOPMENT OVER PERSONAL LUSTS
Dear Editor,
Please permit me to use your highly appreciated community magazine, ESA-OKE TODAY, and its online edition, to bring this important matter to the attention of all, before it becomes a cog in the wheel of the development and progress in our community.
There is a growing concern amongst our elites and some well-to-do compatriots, both at home in the diaspora, over the deluge of all manner of frivolous and make-believe financial requests being bombarded by some of our less privileged ones, especially at home. What make these often embarrassing baseless requests for sundry financial assistance more absurd is the fact that such targets were often sourced from the Esa Oke indigenes social media platform, especially the Home and Abroad WhatsApp platform.
The usual practice is that once an individual is announced on the platform to have made a donation of a certain amount of money towards a developmental project, our people will start bombarding him/her with messages making all manner of charade and frivolous demands for monetary assistance.
The reports getting to me personally are worrisome, odious and distastefully sour. Most of the reports narrated to this magazine are very difficult to believe, yet true.
As a positive thinker and progressive minded person, I viewed this untoward development as most unhelpful and inimical to the progress and developmental strides of our community.
This is because many of the prospective donors are now scared of doing so or having their names announced publicly on the community’s social media platform.
Presently, the community is lacking several facilities and amenities. And in the absence of government’s presence, the ECU is struggling to address them. These men and woman of high integrity are squeezing themselves to the bone marrow to fill the infrastructural gap and bridge the facilities decay in the community. There is little they can do, but to turn to the elites and well-to-do compatriots amongst us for help and assistance.
So far, these compatriots, both in diaspora and home, have been awesome in their
response. They have put in a lot of their hard-earned income, hoping to see some good improvement in the lives and welfare of the generality of our people. But the present unwholesome attitude of bombarding them with selfish requests is antithetical to our collective goal of bridging the infrastructural decay in the community through self-help. This is definitely pushing them off.
We should all plead with our people to exercise self-restraint and hold firm to the principles and the ideology of our fore-fathers. Our fathers carried themselves with high decorum, trained their children well, without resorting to disgraceful requests for assistance. Meanwhile, this is in spite of their extremely low pockets and high societal needs.
I am using this medium to implore us all to custom trim our taste, and live within our means, no matter how meagre. We all know and agree that the country is passing through a rough period, economically, but we believe this is the time to curtail our excessive lusts for frivolities and redirect our priorities.
Awoko Akewi,
Oke Esa Quarters, Esa Oke