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Whenever I use the public transport system in this town I always get a story. It's because the public transportation allows one to interact with the society and feel it's pulse in a way that is almost impossible from the comfort of a private vehicle. So yesterday I got off a bus at Julius Berger round about at around 5pm, rush hour. Naturally there was a fair amount of traffic, pedestrian and vehicular. I had just arrived in the city from my outpost in Gwagwalada and I was hurrying to get in a cab and out of the blistering sun. That was when I saw something that made me stop.

There was a crippled man along the sidewalk. His limbs were shrunk and shriveled and he could only manage to drag his malnourished body along the curb using his forearm while accepting alms from motorists and passersby who threw their loose change in his direction. He looked very exhausted and he had his hands full but every time a  note was thrown out of a moving car or dropped by a pedestrian he would slowly drag himself towards it and clip it with his thumb. So he had lots of change tightly crumpled in one hand and in the other deformed hand he had a biscuit. I stood there a little longer watching him and I noticed that he was drooling. I mean literally drooling and examining the biscuit as though if he stared at it long enough it would magically pop open. Another passerby dropped some change on the road and kept on walking. A cab driver was trying to get his attention too, holding out a 50 naira note but the crippled man was too weak to crawl to him. What happened next took under a minute. I put my bag down, rushed over to the driver, took the 50 and brought it over to the man. I bent over and squeezed it into his tight grip then I took the biscuit from him, opened it and opened the bottle of sprite I had with me before walking away. I did not give him a dime.

 After telling this story to a friend of mine, he had this to say "charity without humanity is a self gratifying exercise to delude oneself that they are doing good". Indeed. It is a most unfortunate phenomenon that has eaten deep into our society, the things people have the most difficulty doing are those things that don't cost any money at all. A man was starving with food in his hand and somehow nobody else could figure out that what he needed was not more money but just a little help.

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