On Sallah Day, up to 20 people were reportedly stampeded to death in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital, while scrambling for items of charity courtesy of Senator Bukola Saraki. The poor folks, also members of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, had been gathered to eat the crumbs that fell from Saraki’s table. It was not the first time this year that such would occur. At the start of Ramadan, three teenagers were reportedly killed in Sokoto, at the governor’s residence during a similar act of charity.

It’s been over a week since the Ilorin incident happened and there has been little said about Police investigations and possible justice for these victims. On Saraki’s Facebook page, where he lamented the disaster, some of his “friends” lashed out at what they labelled his diabolic motives behind feeding people. It was unhelpful that part of his text was even poorly worded. He wrote: Our party’s strength resides solely in the support from party faithful which gives us huge confidence always — it’s very painful to have lost these party faithful.

Does he grieve over the death and the gruesome manner in which it occurred, or his sorrow is about loss of party members who exist as PDP confidence-boosting apparatus?

Anyway, even more agonising is the way he concludes with prayers asking Allah to give everyone (including those whose families are safe at home) the strength to bear the loss. I wished he had not signalled a closure so quickly but gone further to reassure us he and his Peoples Democratic Party cohorts have learnt a lesson for the future. That way, he would not be giving the impression the lives lost were expendable. It is tragic that these deaths recur and nobody is made to account for them. Similar incidents were reported to have taken place in 2011 and 2012.

As a society, we are all implicated in the politics of grief that desensitises us to certain kinds of disasters. Recently, seven people were reported killed in a flood in Ibadan, Oyo State, but it hardly elicited reactions from the body politic. Compare the reactions to the ones that the Associated Airlines plane crash evoked.

First, we all troop out to write endless op-eds. Then we agonise about the failure of our country. Even the Presidency gets moved enough to “order” investigations as if the agencies involved should have to await this executive motivation. Then comes the crash site robbers. They range from miscreants who rush to plane crash sites pretending to help the victims but end up dispossessing them; to naira-and-kobo-politicians who snag the headlines from the dead by writing meaningless op-eds that mystify plane crashes and even suggest possibilities of diabolic rituals. Then, there are the religious leaders who triumphantly announce they prophesied the accidents. They, like robbers and politicians, cash in on the spectacle.

A recent report from the Federal Road Safety Corps indicated that an average of 11 people died every day on Nigerian roads in 2012. Whoever heard the Presidency order any investigation or characteristically set up a committee to “examine” the causes? Why do some disasters merit collective outrage while others are easily disregarded?

Even more troubling is the context of religious ritual in which the Ilorin case occurred. You cannot criticise the exhibitionism of the charity Saraki put up without running against the religious precept that mandates and validates it. To do that is to invite a visceral response from those whose selfhood is intertwined with their faith. Let me say that I do not fear the feral attack from these quarters, I am only wary of detracting from a discourse that should, among other things, clothe the dead with some dignity life deprived them.

The culture of almsgiving during religious festivals is one of the factors that perpetuate the circle of poverty in Nigeria. It feeds a system that ensures the beneficiaries remain what the Martinique-born revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, called the wretched of the earth so they will always need the Sarakis of this world to live a marginally decent life.

Charity also renders them subservient enough to be blind to how their benefactors are implicated in their deprivation.

I am no stranger to these things. I grew up in a city where I frequently witnessed benevolent rich men who could be either politicians, religious leaders or power brokers, feed the poor who crawl to the gates of their palaces. It is a primal scene where the dehumanisation of other people is enacted for those who profit by such.

These poor folks, barely able to afford themselves a dignity, swarm the Big Man’s house to put their misery on the auction block. They are aware their condition either induces guilt feeling or voyeurism (your scopophilic gaze on their abject bodies makes you feel good about your life); both emotions cause you to open your wallet.

Worse, it allows these benefactors assuage their conscience. Rather than question how they are complicit in the warped system that makes poor folks gather on Sallah Day in a concentration camp where they hand food packs to them, benefactors walk away placated they have genuinely done something about existing social problems.

Gradually, the immoral becomes normalised.

So, how do you break the cycle? Do you ask Saraki to desist when the road to his political empire is paved with such almsgiving? It is a system that is bigger than him by the way and it’s perhaps easier for him to sustain it, contenting himself with the good he does. Or, he could do more towards forestalling the number of children destined to inherit their parents’ begging bowls.

At the start of Ramadan, he announced on Facebook he would be giving N100m donation to feeding folks; an average of N3m plus daily spent to feed people whose lives are already a daily fast. Why not provide some money towards long-term and regenerative activities? How about spending N100m to provide a digital library for the University of Ilorin? Or, N100m to upgrade the primary schools in his constituency to world standard? Or even N100m to fund research that points our society towards stronger and more viable democracies?

It is not my prerogative to tell him what to do with his money but I think as a young urbane person, he needs to do better than running the “God bless massa” culture he inherited from his father. You can feed people for 30 days but what good does it do in the long run? Food for the belly, belly for the food, aren’t both destined for perdition? Sadly, perdition was what became of those hapless victims of the Ilorin scramble for food packs at Saraki’s house.