Pastor Tony Bassey, Founder of the Good-News Widows Outreach, on Thursday said he left his borehole business in Katsina State to care for and generate data of widows in Cross River State.
Bassey, whose foundation is based in Ikom, said he started traveling around villages in the 18 Local Government Areas of Cross River in 2007, to meet and generate data of widows in the State for developmental purposes.
Speaking in Calabar, he said it took him three and a half years to go round the villages in the State to collate data of the widows.
“When God called me, he gave me the scripture in Isaiah Chapter 1 verse 17, which reads ‘Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.’
“I had to dismantle every other thing, especially my borehole business that I had been engaged in for 15 years because I was sure of what my father called me to do.
“I traveled down to Ikom and asked for the widows in the community and was shown two of them. I started having meetings with them and from there, I started keeping their data and progressed to other LGAs,” he said.
The Pastor disclosed: “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 windows.
“This is 2021 and we are going out again to the villages in the state to update our records, we have had many communal clashes in the State, and this increased the number of widows.
“After one year, we will be able to have more recent statistics of widows in the state but I know it has increased; I also know that some have remarried, while some are even late”.
Bassey maintained that he had seen a lot of people, especially politicians, based in Calabar and only carried out programmes in the capital but he decided he needed to see these windows in the villages and to know them.
He said in his work, he had always dissuaded the widows from begging but the government had a lot to do to encourage the widows and their children.
“I have always tried to dissuade them from going to beg, some of them can learn skills and the government can organise this at the LGs or Senatorial District levels.
“Many of them and their children want to go to school but cannot; we need to encourage and support them to get education as there is no age barrier in education.
“There is a lot the government can do for this section of the society and not just use them during elections and dump them after gaining power,” he said.
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