By Bose Adelaja

The President of Mobility Aid and Appliances Research and Development Centre, MAARDEC, Mr Cosmos Okoli has donated wheel chairs to some physically challenged persons in the Amuwo-Odofin area of Lagos State. One of the beneficiaries is 30-year-old Dare Ogunbona.

The donations were made during a road show to round off Okoli’s campaign to represent Amuwo-Odofin constituency in the House of Representatives under the platform of the Labour Party.

Presenting the wheelchair to Ogunbona who was walking on all fours when he met Okoli, the MAARDEC boss said the plight of Ogunbona prompted him to assist him with the wheelchair. “People living in my constituency are suffering and there is poverty everywhere. Nigeria is so blessed that there is no justifiable reason to have so much poverty in the land. I am vying for a place in the National Assembly to ensure that we make the right laws that will be favourable to physically-challenged persons,’‘ he said.

Okoli said about two million people have benefitted from MAARDEC’s intervention. “I crawled for 12 years before I had an intervention. It is very dehumanizing and degrading; no human being should be crawling like a goat. As long as we have the resources, we will continue to give enough mobility and appliances, particularly to those who cannot afford them. When we get to government, we are going to do it in a more sustainable way, he said.

Responding, Ogunbona said the gesture will enable him do what he could not do before now.

The campaign witnessed a large turnout of physically-challenged persons who said they have suffered maginalisation and discrimination in the past simply because they are not well represented in the government. ‘’People don’t want to reckon with those of us who are physically- challenged, they don’t regard us as human beings. For instance, many of us cannot enter into banks or churches. I cannot use my wheelchair to enter these places unless people help me. If we are fully represented, government will look into our plight and make some infrastructural facilities conducive for us,’‘ chorused Chukwudum Okonkwo, Doris Julius and Yinka Babatunde.