The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Betta Edu, has revealed that the current administration discovered some suspicious beneficiaries of the Npower programme.
The minister, who stated this during an interview with Arise TV on Monday, noted that the Npower payment list contains the names of people who shouldn’t be on the programme.
She, however, assured that the ministry is working hard to rectify all the loopholes hindering the success of the social intervention scheme.
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She said: “First of all, when we came on board, we found lots of issues with the Npower programme that made us re-engage the entire plan.
“One of the things was that there were persons registered on the Npower beyond the envelope that was provided for the programme.
“Secondly, funds were released for payment for people under Npower and they were not paid in a timely manner by the managers of the funds of the Npower beneficiaries.
“There were also people who were on the payment list who are not supposed to be there, and there are persons who are there but are not providing any services but have been enrolled to have payment.
“And there are people whose time with the Npower had elapsed since a year ago but they still believe they should continue to get payment, so they called it exit plan, exit payment and so on.
“So the first thing we did was to set up a committee to look at these issues which has the secretary of the ministry as the head, and we have received our first report.”
The minister also said that Tinubu’s administration was committed to pulling 133 million Nigerians out of poverty by 2030 in line with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, and by next year, at least 20 million Nigerians would be out of poverty.
“For poverty alleviation, we are targeting at least 133 million Nigerians between now and 2030 which is in line with the SDGs that we signed at the United Nations.
“But beyond showing commitment to the UN, the president is very committed and concerned about the plight of Nigerians and about pulling them out of poverty.
“The difference here is that we are not going to continue doing things the same way and expect different results.
“There are different plans we are working on and we believe very strongly that by the next one year, we should be able to say that at least we have removed 20 million Nigerians out of poverty,” she said.
DAILY NIGERIAN
