Pastor Tony Bassey, Founder of the Good-News Widows Outreach, announced on Thursday that he had left his borehole business in Katsina to care for and collect data on widows in Cross River.
Bassey, whose foundation is based in Ikom, said he began traveling around villages in Cross River’s 18 Local Government Areas in 2007 to meet and collect data on widows in the state for development purposes.
He told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Calabar that it took him three and a half years to go around the villages in the state collecting data on widows.
“When God called me, he gave me the verse from Isaiah Chapter 1 verse 17: ‘Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, and plead for the widow.’
“I had to dismantle everything else, especially my borehole business that I had been running for 15 years, because I knew what my father had called me to do.”
“I went to Ikom and asked for the widows in the community, and I was shown two of them.” “I began by meeting with them, and from there, I began keeping their data and progressed to other LGAs,” he explained.
“Although later, some people joined me in 2011, we had files containing the data of 40,000 widows in Cross River; in 2016, we updated our records after going round again and had 66,000 widows,” the Pastor explained.
“It is 2021, and we are returning to the villages in the state to update our records. There have been many communal clashes in the state, which has increased the number of widows.”
“After a year, we will be able to have more recent statistics on widows in the state, but I know it has increased; I also know that some have remarried, and some are even late.”
Bassey maintained that he had seen a lot of people, particularly politicians, who were based in Calabar and only carried out programs in the capital, but he decided he needed to see and know these widows in the villages.
He stated that in his work, he had always discouraged widows from begging, but that the government needed to do more to encourage widows and their children.
“I’ve always tried to discourage them from going to beg, because some of them can learn skills, and the government can organize this at the LG or Senatorial District levels.”
“Many of them and their children want to go to school but are unable to; we must encourage and support them to get an education because there is no age limit in education.”
“There is a lot the government can do for this segment of society other than just use them during elections and then dump them once they gain power,” he said.
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