Once again, the Nigerian government is planning to commence its humanitarian programs across the country as the general elections draw near.
An approval for the disbursement of N400 billion under the National Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy (NPRGS) for various poverty reductions schemes such as TraderMoni has been granted, NAN reports.
Per NAN, a member of the NPRGS, Governor Abdullahi Sule of Nasarawa, disclosed this to State House correspondents after a meeting of the National Steering Committee of NPRGS on Thursday at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
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President Muhammadu Buhari, had in 2021, inaugurated NPRGS to be chaired by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.
Mr Sule said the meeting was to review the implementation of what was approved in the budget.
“It is a meeting of the steering committee of the Presidential Poverty and Growth Strategy.
“The last meeting we had, the fourth meeting, we were able to set up various working groups that were going to prepare the total budget that was required.
“So, they were able to do that and then we were also able to obtain the president’s approval.
“Based on the president’s approval and availability in the budget, this meeting that we had was actually just to go through the implementation of whatever has been approved, both in the budget and by the president.”
He said that the first highlight of the meeting was to commend the technical groups that had been able to put together their budget request.
The governor listed some of the programmes through which the Federal Government was implementing the NPRGS.
“Looking at what is available in the budget this year, which is roughly N400 billion, the Humanitarian Ministry is going to take N350 billion for the expansion of the various programmes like Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme(GEEP), Conditional Cash Transfer, Farmer Money, Market Money and the rest of that.
“There is also another N50 billion that is going to be reserved for the various other programmes like in the Ministry of Agriculture for rural roads, electricity in terms of solar.
“Those are the various areas that we discussed,” he said.
President Muhammadu Buhari on June 22, 2021 inaugurated the committee tasked with driving the target of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years.
However, just as in the past, the timing of the program rings a bell. Close to the 2018 general elections, the Buhari administration began the TraderMoni initiative, a collateral-free loan of N5,000 and N10,000 given to petty traders and artisans.
The scheme, which fell under the National Social Investment Programme of the Federal Government, drew wide criticism with many, including international watchdogs, describing it as vote buying.
The chairman of Amnesty International, an anti-corruption organization, Awwal Rafsanjani, described it as a form of voter inducement. He noted that the initiative being no “part and parcel of the manifesto of the ruling party and being not in the Nigerian constitution,” was an “official use of public funds in the name of TraderMoni to actually induce voters.”
“It was not done three years ago. It was only started close to election time. So, the allegation by many Nigerians that this is clearly a case of vote buying using public funds goes contrary to our constitution and to having a free and fair election.
“That is why the Independent National Electoral Commission itself has seen this danger. The vote buying we are seeing has transformed to have more official recognition through the acts that unfortunately we are seeing performed by some of the agencies using public funds.
“This is despite the statement by the President that public funds will not be used for his re-election campaign. But this, unfortunately, is contrary to what Nigerians are seeing,” he said.
Besides vote-buying, another concern has been that the social intervention programs, which have been trailed with allegations of corruption, have done nothing to alleviate poverty in Nigeria.
Last month, The African Network for Economic and Environment Justice, ANEEJ, revealed that the $322.5 million stolen funds from former Military Head of State Gen Sani Abacha has been shared in four years (between 2018-2022) to 1.9 million poor and vulnerable Nigerians.
Unfortunately, the disbursed fund has done nothing to ameliorate the economic situation in the country, as more Nigerians have fallen into abject poverty within this period.
Advocates of good governance have urged the federal government to channel the fund to projects that will bring value to Nigerians. The N400 billion earmarked for the social intervention program is said to be more than enough to send university students, who have been at home for over four months now due to the strike action of academic staff union ASUU, back to school.