TRACKING__Aminu Nyako is the special assistant on Social Investment to the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development. In this interview with journalists, spoke on the disengagement of Batch A and B on the N-Power programme and the enrolment of Batch C
The N-Power will commence
on Friday, who qualifies for the programme and what happens to the Batches A and B that would be
disengaged.?
The N-Power portal will open on June 26th that is on Friday, precisely, it is eligible to all Nigerians to apply.
Previous batches were focus on graduate, but now we are opening up for all Nigerians to benefit from the
programme. The NBS said there are 40 million Nigerian youths that are unemployed to which the N-Power was
able to cater for 500,000 in four years.
We believe that is just one percent and there are lots of Nigerian youths that are willing and able to participate in the programme. The portal is N-power.gov.ng. It is a hybrid model that seek to cater for a large breed of Nigerian youths age range is between 18-35 years and the portal will be open by noon June 26th, 2020.
Telling about Batches A and B
that would be disengaged, some are complaining that they haven’t been paid their stipends, what is happening? into other opportunities be it other government programmes and private
sector opportunities. We do understand that they being on the programme
for a minimum of 24 months across batches and we understand that they are extremely committed to
the programme. However, we need to pen the programmes to more
beneficiaries for them to come on stream into the laudable programme
of President Muhammadu Buhari. The transition will seek to leverage some
of the success stories that have bene identified currently within the N-Power
programme a lot of beneficiaries have already created jobs for themselves
while others have private sector engagements.
There are some that came out of their engagements and carved a niche for
themselves such as a lady from Ogun State that has a fishing farm for herself,
so we are encouraging beneficiaries to do same or we would move them into
private sector engagement.
Why is it that whenever N-Power is mentioned people have negative
notion about it?
It is not necessary negative, substitute is a very large intervention programme
to youth populations and you know they have a lot of energy or be it, to say there
would be communication gap when you are trying to communicate to 500,000
beneficiaries at the same time and some implementation challenges, however, the benefits of the programme to the people are undeniable and we believe
that the Batch C would take on all the lessons learnt in terms of how the programme is being implemented and
it would be improved on in the Batch C. Some participants are collecting
salaries and still be part of the N-Power beneficiaries, how are you going to tackle that?
We had these rumours and the ministry has already put mechanism to ensure that it does not occur in the Batch C enrolment.
Yes, the ministry is aware that some beneficiaries are yet to receive their stipends. The 2020 budget kicked off in March and we had to move into the Gifmis platform and
during the transition, some records of beneficiaries were rejected by the system and currently the ministry is in
the process of reconciling those record and payment would be made to the
beneficiaries. I think it is also important for the public to know that the ministry
does not own the N-Power beneficiaries but it is within the TSA, so once the
reconciliation is made beneficiaries will receive their stipends as slated. We heard that those to be disengaged will be incorporated into a particular programmes.
What is your take on
this?
The ministry had designed transition plan that will place the Batch A and B beneficiaries of the N-Pow
