N-Power is one the achievements of this administration led by President Muhammadu Buhari. In this post I’ll quickly mention one or two differences between N-Power and Sure-P of APC-led government and PDP respectively.
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Both programmes were geared towards reducing unemployment among young Nigerian graduates. While Sure-P was a noble idea of Nigerian former leader Dr Goodluck Jonathan, N-Power is a job initiative programme of President Buhari.
It’s a two-year programme. 200, 000 unemployed graduates were enrolled in 2016 (batch one, while 300, 000 made the 2017 list (batch two). That makes 500, 000 apart from the non-graduate category of the programme.
Number one thing Prof. Yemi Osinbajo (whose office supervises the programme) did was to insist that monthly stipend (N30, 000) are paid directly into the accounts of beneficiaries.
State governors through their forum lobbied his office for them to be the intermediaries, but it failed.
Buhari/Osinbajo were aware how state governors owed their workers, paying NPower salaries into the accounts of state governments would have made the programme a total failure as #SureP.
You dont need political affiliation to make NPower list. It is not designed for the North alone. It’s for all qualified Nigerian graduates.
During PDP era , the government couldn’t account for N500 billion SURE-P money in 2013 alone.
SURE-P was the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) for unemployed graduates.
Beneficiaries of SURE-P were paid #25,000 as monthly stipend, sadly a percentage of a beneficiary’s stipend went to the coordinator of the programme in his local government.
And after PDP lost the 2015 election the government led by Dr Goodluck Jonathan stopped paying the beneficiaries. It owed them February, March, April , and May, despite the approval by the National Assembly billions of Naira in 2014 for the programme.
That’s a clear difference between Buhari and others at the other side of Nigeria’s political river.
SURE-P was one of the loopholes the last administration deliberately created for his cronies where billions of dollars were siphoned every month.
It would be unfair for someone to say Buhari hasn’t done anything. Through NPower alone, hundreds of beneficiaries have gained financial independence.
NPower is one of the achievements of Buhari.