In May, Babajimi Benson’s constituency office began paying out N50,000 business grants to 600 market traders and small business owners across Ikorodu. It was one more entry in a ledger the federal lawmaker has been building for years.
That ledger runs through the iCare Foundation, the vehicle behind most of Benson’s welfare work. Its FoodBank reaches roughly 500 residents monthly, including widows, elderly people and persons with disabilities. The programme, his office says, has run continuously for eight years.
Other figures point toward livelihoods rather than relief. An earlier constituency report recorded 205 residents receiving items such as motorcycles, freezers, sewing machines and grinding machines, alongside entrepreneurship training for more than 350 youths with startup capital attached. Benson’s own website puts the empowered figure closer to 2,500.
The consistency is something to boast about, truly. Plus the range of activity: business grants, vocational training, solar installation courses run with the Nigerian Armed Forces Resettlement Centre, and monthly food support.
Infrastructure claims sit alongside the welfare figures: more than 65 roads constructed, an 80-bed Mother and Child Hospital in Imota, and a Light Up Ikorodu project covering 18 transformers and thousands of solar streetlights and household installations across the constituency.
In April, he commissioned new classroom blocks in Ikorodu West and North, including a six-classroom building at Isawo Junior High School, and his office also counts a community radio station, IKD 106.1 FM, among its legacy projects.
A grinding machine handed to a trader or a solar training slot given to a young technician only matters if it outlasts the news cycle that reported it. Ikorodu’s residents, not Benson’s press releases, will eventually be the ones who answer that. And they are already doing just this, joyously.