Getting The FEC To Clean Up Its Cookstove Act, By Temilade Sesan
A few weeks ago, newspapers around the country reported on an issue that hardly ever makes its way to the forefront of public consciousness: clean cookstoves for the poor. Several popular blogs ran reprints of the newspaper articles, most of them featuring reader comments that were unapologetically and almost uniformly vilifying in their condemnation of what many see as the government’s latest display of ineptitude and wastefulness. The crux of the story is that the Federal Executive Council suddenly announced plans to import clean cookstove components and ‘wonderbags’ for free distribution to ‘poor rural women’ with the colossal sum of N9.2 billion – and this is for the first phase alone. By the time the ‘aggressive’ scheme winds up five years from now, the project is expected to have spent tens of billions more procuring a total of 20 million cookstoves for poor households nationwide. Notwithstanding the public sentiments alleging subterfuge and foul play, it is inde