“Vice President Going Around Distributing Money,” says Atiku, knocking on TraderMoni and MarketMoni’s doors

Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, has criticized the Muhammadu Buhari administration’s social investment model.
Atiku stated on Sunday during a Channels Television town hall event that there is a major flaw in the program’s design and implementation.

He mocked the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, and the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Hajia Sayiya Umar Farouq, for going about distributing physical cash in marketplaces.

According to the former Vice President, the program has been hijacked and turned into a political campaign tool for a specific political party.

Instead of distributing money at random, he advocated for the establishment of institutions to manage such programs.

“I believe the flaw in the system is the failure to incorporate the system into an institutionalised process, because what I understood TraderMoni and Market (Moni) with either the Vice President or the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs going around distributing money.”

“Why not establish institutions that can actually attend to every sector of the economy in terms of this MarketMoni or TraderMoni?” As previously stated, we intend to vote N10 billion to support small and medium-sized businesses.

“We have a number of institutions where such funding can be channeled so that it is institutionalised, rather than personalised and used for political purposes, because MarketMoni and TraderMoni have currently become political tools to promote political interests of a particular political party,” Atiku said.

I’m not going to abandon it.
The PDP candidate, on the other hand, ruled out scrapping TraderMoni, MarketMoni, and other current administration social investment programs, but promised to review them to make them more impactful on the grassroots.

“What I am saying is that they should be incorporated into an institution,” he said, “so that it survives every government that comes in.” “(The traders are not integrated) because no institution exists.”

“If you have an institution to cater for that, the institution will be able to give everyone guidelines: ‘This is how you access these funds, and this is how long it will take you to repair them, and so on and so forth.”

Follow News reports MarketMoni and TraderMoni are initiatives launched by the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) in 2017 and 2018, respectively, to boost the country’s economy through leverage and access to finance for petty traders.