While I was reading through today's topic selection on the Hive Learners community hangout because I was trying to vote, one of the topics there caught my attention, unfortunately it ended up not winning but I'm writing on it anyways.
About two or three years ago, I had participated in my first ever government empowerment program. My aunt who lives not too far away from me has always been someone who likes to attend this kind of stuff, so for some reason she had decided that she wanted me to benefit from it too.
Fortunately for me, when she told me about it, it was the deadline to register and if I had waited any longer, I would have missed it. Although I got to find out that even if I had missed the initial registration date that was set by the government, these guys in charge of the program would have found a way to smuggle me in anyway and this was because they were benefiting from it.
I found out that if you were smuggled in through the back door, these guys would automatically be entitled to a certain percentage of the monthly payment the government will be sending directly to you. And this wasn't legal, it was done on a low key. So whenever the government sent money to the participants, the participants will have to send a certain amount back to those people's account, as a form of 'thank you' for letting me in...and like I said, this happened every month.
Of course this didn't come as a surprise to me, as this is Nigeria and people will always look for a way to rig the system in whatever they do here, so it was kinda expected.
Anyways, the class lasted for a while (maybe a month or two, I can't remember), and honestly, I don't think I went to the classes up till seven times and this was for two reasons. The first was because I was still a student back then and had classes to attend, so I only went to the empowerment thing whenever I had the chance to and wasn't feeling exhausted. The second reason was because that whole place was filled with elderly people and so what was being taught was something kids in nursery would know.
So whenever I went, the whole thing was usually just boring and tiring for me and it got to a stage where I just decided that I wasn't going to go anymore, unless on special occasions where we had maybe like external tutors or something.
I continued like that until it was finally the day of the exam (the government needed to be sure we had indeed learnt what was being taught) and it was exactly what I had thought it would be. The questions were too cheap and yet these guys still provided answers to go around and this was simply because the old guys were finding it really difficult to answer any of the questions.
The topic during the entire program was centered around the repair of mobile phones and so when the program finally came to an end, we were gifted some equipments that could be used for phone repairs... But guess what?
These same guys, the ones in charge of the empowerment program, still provided people who were buying those equipments if you wanted to sell yours.
It was a crazy but fun experience and definitely something I would love to participate in again, but this time with young people like myself.
