By Jide Ojo
“The council approved for the establishment of the Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation Trust Fund to actually be put together under a governing board…..the implementation of that humanitarian and poverty trust fund would be carefully worked out by members of the committee. Of course, it will involve the Minister of Finance and other ministers that are relevant to the process. This is a flexible form of financing that is supposed to help Nigeria adequately respond to a humanitarian crisis. This will also respond to challenges as well as adequately address the issue of poverty in Nigeria and bring victory for the poor and indeed, bring help and succour which the Renewed Hope Agenda stands for”
–Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr Betta Edu, while addressing State House correspondents after the Federal Executive Council Meeting on Monday, October 23, 2023
According to the World Bank, “Social protection systems are at the heart of boosting human capital and empowering people. They help individuals and families, especially the poor and vulnerable, cope with crises and shocks, find jobs, improve productivity, invest in the health and education of their children, and protect the aging population. Social protection systems that are well-designed can have powerful impacts in the long-term, by reducing inequalities, building resilience and ending the inter-generational cycle of poverty. Such systems and tools are transformative as they help mitigate economic and fiscal shocks and provide opportunity by giving people a chance to get out of poverty and become productive members of society.” As of March 2023, the World Bank is providing $26bn in financing through its social protection and jobs programmes across regions and income levels.
Perhaps, it is the Bretton Wood institution called the World Bank that sold the idea of NSIP to former President Muhammadu Buhari. Indeed, it is the ex-president’s signature programme for which he will be remembered for life. The NSIP was established in 2016 as a social safety net to care for the poor and needy. The seed fund then was N500bn. It was the biggest welfarist programme in Africa at inception. According to the information gleaned from the website of the agency, “The suite of programmes under the NSIP focuses on ensuring a more equitable distribution of resources to vulnerable populations, including children, youth and women. Since 2016, these programmes combined have supported more than four million beneficiaries’ countrywide through a fair and transparent process supported by the Ministry of Budget and National Planning and other notable MDAs with aligned goals.”
The programmes under the NSIP are fourfold. The N-Power programme is designed to assist young Nigerians between the ages of 18 and 35 to acquire and develop lifelong skills for becoming change makers in their communities and players in the domestic and global markets and given a stipend of N30,000 monthly. There are four sectors in N-Power namely; education, agriculture, health and vocational training. The Conditional Cash Transfer programme directly supports those within the lowest poverty bracket by improving nutrition, increasing household consumption and supporting the development of human capital through cash benefits to various categories of the poor and vulnerable. The support is conditioned on fulfilling soft and hard co-responsibilities that enable recipients to improve their standard of living.
Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme is a micro-lending intervention that targets traders, artisans, enterprising youth, farmers and women in particular, by providing loans between N10,000 and N100,000 at no monthly cost to beneficiaries. The home-grown school feeding programme is reducing the incidence of malnutrition (especially among the poor and those ordinarily unable to eat a meal a day), empowering community women as cooks, and supporting small farmers that help economic growth stimulation.
There is no gainsaying that the motive behind the establishment of the NSIP is noble and laudable. However, the implementation has been enmeshed in swirling controversies and corrupt practices. This newspaper in its May 26, 2019 edition reported that, “President Muhammadu Buhari’s wife, Aisha, has rubbished the N500bn Social Investment Programme of her husband’s administration, saying that it has failed ‘woefully,’ especially in the North. Aisha, who hails from Adamawa State, said the situation in her home state, as far as the SIP implementation was concerned, was pathetic. She also cited Kano, a highly-populated northern state, as another example where she believed the programme had failed, despite the huge funds the Federal Government had budgeted for it.”The Guardian in its July 12, 2020 edition reported that, “Since its inception, the scheme has had the misfortune of attracting controversies, with the latest being the newly introduced Modified Home Grown School Feeding Programme, which got many to conclude that feeding schoolchildren to improve their health and to spur school enrolment were far from being the major objectives of the initiative. Despite protestations from Nigerians, the Minister of MHADMSD, Hajia Sadiya Farouq, went ahead with the strange feeding programme claiming that the Presidency directed her ministry to carry out the exercise even when schools are closed. According to her, she was mandated to deliver feeding support to 3.5 million homes, as against pupils.”The Guardian reported further that, “The leadership of the National Assembly is not just irked by the way and manner that the NSIPs are being implemented; it is even displeased with the current national social register being used, which it claims was contrived by ‘the World Bank method,’ hence the compelling need for it to be immediately discarded. The Senate President Ahmad Lawan, and Speaker, House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, when they met with Minister Farouq, and some top officials of the ministry in April, lamented that the funds have failed to reach those for whom the initiative was created.” Recently, on July 20, 2023, the National Economic Council unanimously resolved to do away with the national social register used by the Buhari administration to implement its conditional cash transfer, saying it lacks credibility. Consequently, it asked states to generate their own registers for such cash transfers. This is the same register that has been used for seven years!
On Saturday, October 7, 2023, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr. Betta Edu, announced the indefinite suspension of the N-Power programme during a live interview on TVC News. Edu said the programme had been marred by irregularities, adding that the government had launched an investigation into the utilisation of funds since the inception of the scheme. She added that some of the beneficiaries of the programme were not found in their places of assignment, yet they were receiving monthly stipends. She also stated that some of the N-Power beneficiaries ought to have exited the programme in 2022, but were still on the payroll.
On October 1, 2023, President Bola Tinubu announced that 15 million households would receive N25,000 for three months. Last week, precisely on October 17, 2023, the President, represented by the Secretary to the Federal Government, Senator George Akume, launched the Renewed Hope Conditional Cash Transfer for 15 million households. The launch was held at the Press Gallery of the State House in Abuja coinciding with the World Poverty Eradication Day. On top of this is the FEC approval of the establishment of the $5bn Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation Trust Fund.
What is the transparency and accountability framework as well as the monitoring and evaluation template put in place to ensure that this huge investment is not misappropriated? Has the fraudulent social register been cleaned up to allow for the disbursement of this huge fund under the CCT? How does the Federal Government want to recover loans disbursed under the GEEP programme from defaulters? How do we bring culprits who have embezzled the NSIP funds to book? Can Nigerians trust Dr. Betta Edu to do better than her predecessor?
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