A Partnership That Brings Smiles
By David Okpokwasili
There is a particular kind of joy that visits a community when government, at whatever level, remembers the people at the bottom of the pyramid. Yesterday, Thursday, September 10, 2026, that joy arrived in Anambra State in the person of Nigeria’s First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, who touched down in Awka to commission the South-East zonal rollout of the National Community Food Bank Programme and to preside over the empowerment of five thousand persons with the wife of the Governor of Anambra State, Mrs Nonye Soludo. By the time her convoy left the state, thousands of Ndi Anambra — market women, widows, nursing mothers and the elderly — had reason to smile because of food on the table and capital in the pocket.
It would have been easy to reduce this visit to another item on a long list of ceremonial engagements that dot Nigeria’s political calendar. But to do so would be to miss the real story: that here, in Anambra, a state governed by an opposition party, the Federal Government and the state authorities have chosen partnership over partisanship, and the people are the direct beneficiaries.
The First Lady’s visit had two major components. The first was the formal commissioning of the National Community Food Bank Programme (NCFBP) for the South-East. The programme, conceived and chaired by Mrs Tinubu, is designed to place nutritious food within reach of vulnerable households, with particular emphasis on children under six, pregnant women and nursing mothers who bear the heaviest burden of food insecurity and malnutrition. According to Anambra’s Commissioner for Health, Dr Afam Obidike, beneficiaries in the state are being identified and assessed through primary healthcare centres closest to them, ensuring that those who genuinely need help are the ones who get it.
The second component, arguably the one that will linger longest in the memory of ordinary Anambra people, was the empowerment of 5000 persons. You will appreciate the figure and humanity of this empowerment if you multiply that figure by the dependents in each household — spouses, children, and extended family. Grants, tools of trade and startup support handed to petty traders, tailors, hairdressers and small farmers do not just fight poverty in the abstract; they pay school fees, settle hospital bills and put food on tables for months to come.
This partnership between Abuja and Awka is not a one-off gesture but a sustained engagement across multiple sectors of public life.
Governor Chukwuma Soludo governs Anambra under the platform of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), while President Bola Tinubu leads the Federal Government under the All Progressives Congress (APC). On paper, these are rival political platforms, the sort that in other climes — and indeed in other Nigerian states — might translate into frosty relations, starved federal allocations to opposition states, or public sparring for the benefit of the cameras. Anambra has offered a refreshing departure from that script.
Since assuming office, Governor Soludo has consistently maintained that his government would work with whichever administration sits in Aso Rock, insisting that development knows no party colour. That philosophy has borne fruit. In his last visit to Anambra, President Tinubu commissioned landmark projects built by the state government and warmly spoke of his decades-long friendship with the governor and of Anambra’s development trajectory. That cordiality has now extended visibly into the social welfare space, with the First Lady’s office repeatedly choosing Anambra as a partner state for her interventions, from the earlier distribution of rice and cash palliatives to rural women, to yesterday’s food bank commissioning and mass empowerment exercise.
This is what genuine federalism should look like: a state government and a federal government, separated by party colours but united by a shared understanding that the ordinary citizen does not care which logo appears on the relief materials, only that the relief arrives.
There will always be those who view every act of federal-state cooperation through a purely political lens, forever asking what each side stands to gain, or whether a governor from one party accepting largesse from a president of another amounts to some kind of ideological capitulation. Such analysis, while sometimes necessary in the rough and tumble of politics, misses the point entirely when the subject matter deals directly with the vulnerable.
If it benefits the vulnerable and empowers the powerless, why bicker? A child does not eat political affiliation. A nursing mother queuing at a primary healthcare centre in Nnewi or Onitsha for nutritional support does not first ask whether the programme was conceived by APC or APGA before she accepts it gratefully. A petty trader in Ekwulobia handed grant money to expand her business does not weigh the party card of the government official who signed off on the scheme before she puts that money to work. What matters to the ordinary Anambra person is simple and immediate: is there food, is there support, is there a pathway out of hardship? This is the wisdom that both Governor Soludo and President Tinubu, along with the First Lady, appear to have internalised, deliberately. Politics is a contest for power, but governance is a duty to the governed, and the two need not always collide. When leaders on different sides of the political divide find enough common ground to jointly deliver food security, healthcare access, education infrastructure and economic empowerment to the same set of citizens, that is not compromise — it is statesmanship. It is also, frankly, good politics, because a hungry, hopeless citizenry benefits no one, regardless of which party ultimately claims credit for feeding them.
Beyond the immediate cheer of yesterday’s event, this visit carries a larger lesson for how Nigeria’s federal structure ought to function. Anambra is not the only opposition-led state, and the National Community Food Bank Programme is meant to eventually achieve nationwide coverage by 2027. But the enthusiasm and warmth with which the state has received successive federal interventions offer something of a template. It shows that cooperation is possible without either side surrendering its political identity, and that citizens are the ultimate winners when their leaders choose collaboration over needless confrontation
For who walked away yesterday with something tangible in hand, and for the countless households who will, in the weeks ahead, draw nutritional support from the newly commissioned food bank, the politics behind the gesture will matter far less than its impact. That, in the end, is what makes this a partnership that brings smiles. And if the smiles keep coming, spreading from Awka to every corner of Anambra State, then perhaps the rest of the country’s leaders, regardless of party, would do well to take note.
