Obi Aguocha: Surest Answer To An Allegation Of Missing Rice Is Not A Lawsuit Alone. It Is To Publish The Quantities Received, The Repackaging Records, The Ward-by-ward Schedule And The Signed Beneficiary Lists – Then Let The Constituency Compare Them With What It Actually Received – By Mandate 27 Group 

Obi Aguocha: Surest Answer To An Allegation Of Missing Rice Is Not A Lawsuit Alone. It Is To Publish The Quantities Received, The Repackaging Records, The Ward-by-ward Schedule And The Signed Beneficiary Lists – Then Let The Constituency Compare Them With What It Actually Received – By Mandate 27 Group

The greatest miracle in Ikwuano/Umuahia Federal Constituency today is not that Jesus turned water into wine or multiplied five loaves of bread and two fish to feed over 5,000 people, with 12 baskets left over. No! The real miracle is that Obi Aguocha allegedly turned 50kg bags of rice into 5kg bags! Miracle no dey tire this man!

Every miracle of Jesus in scripture added something. Water became wine, so the wedding had more to drink. Five loaves and two fish became a feast, so the crowd had more to eat, with twelve baskets left over. The miracle attributed to the honourable member runs in the opposite direction. The Federal Government released two trailer loads of 50kg bags of rice, and what the constituents were shown in pictures were 5kg bags. In the gospel, the crowd ate and the leftovers were gathered. In this version, the crowd saw photographs and the leftovers have not been located.

Let us do the arithmetic that no press release has dared to do. A 50kg bag that becomes a 5kg bag has lost 45kg. If one bag can lose 45kg, then two trailer loads can lose a great deal more. Even if the rice was repackaged into smaller bags, that would mean ten 5kg bags for every 50kg bag, and the people are entitled to ask where the other nine are. The honourable member has not offered one line of numbers to settle it.

This is why Chief Charles Ogbonna (Evuleogu)’s allegation struck such a chord. He did not invent the questions. He only said aloud what constituents had been whispering since the pictures first appeared. The response from the honourable member’s office was a six-section statement, a roll call of political enemies, a list of statutes, and a threat of court. Not one section carried a waybill, a distribution schedule or a list of beneficiaries. A man who has the records does not need six sections. He needs one page.

The politics of this deserves some honesty. Palliatives were meant to cushion hunger, but they have too often become tools of patronage, with the real work of accounting left to the end of the queue. In a constituency where families are still counting the cost of the subsidy removal, rice is not a campaign souvenir. It is a measure of whether the representative stands between the people and the market, or stands in the market himself. That is why the question is not about hotels, sponsors or old family quarrels. It is about bags and kilograms, and kilograms do not lie.

So we will keep asking the questions that matter. Where are the original 50kg bags of rice? Who received the 5kg bags? And where are the remaining 45kg per bag? These are not insults. They are the simplest audit questions in the world, and any representative who has served transparently can answer them in an afternoon.

To be fair to the honourable member, he has a clear way out. He has threatened to sue Chief Ogbonna (Evuleogu), and that is his right. But the surest answer to an allegation of missing rice is not a lawsuit alone. It is to publish the quantities received, the repackaging records, the ward-by-ward schedule and the signed beneficiary lists, then let the constituency compare them with what it actually received.

The people deserve clear answers, not miracles that exist only in political narration. Until those answers come, the constituency will go on doing what it has always done, which is to count carefully and remember everything.