In his bid to ensure the successful take
off of the social protection programmes promised by his administration,
President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the appointment of Mrs. Maryam
Uwais as his Special Adviser for Social Protection Plan.
Uwais, a lawyer with over 20 years’ experience, is said to have already started work in the office of the Vice President.
A top Presidency official who pleaded anonymity disclosed this to selected journalists in Abuja on Sunday.
The official said the 2016 Budget
proposal was loaded with provisions for the implementation of the social
programmes, hence the reason why “the Presidency is seeing the current
controversy in the Senate regarding two versions of the proposed budget
as a distraction and a storm in a tea cup.”
“The budget sent out by the Presidency
is a bunch of proposals which would only become sacrosanct relatively
after it has become an appropriation. To now have all this hue and cry
on alleged versions, and switched copies is not just a distraction, but a
storm in a tea cup,” he said.
For instance, the official said a
provision had been made in the budget to grant a one-time soft loan of
about N60,000 each to one million market women, men and artisans in
2016.
The official said there were important
components in the budget proposals which should be discussed including
the soft loan, which he said, was the micro-credit component of the
Buhari’s Social Protection programmes.
This component, according to the
official, will gulp about N60bn and is one of a six-point social
protection programme of the administration.
He added that the details of the
implementation of the micro-credit scheme were being worked out and
would be rolled out once the budget must have been approved by the
National Assembly.
He also said there were five other
social protection schemes identified to be coordinated by Uwais with an
effective inter-ministerial involvement.
“Besides the micro-credit scheme, there
are five other social investment plans of the Buhari administration
already provided for in the budget with about N500bn, or an
unprecedented nine per cent of the total budget.
“It is believed that this is the first
time that the Federal Government is spending this much on targeted
social welfare scheme,” he said.
He listed the five other schemes to
include the Teach Nigeria Scheme; the Youth Employment Agency; the
Conditional Cash Transfer Scheme; the Home Grown School Feeding
Initiative and Free Education Scheme for Science Students.
Under the Teach Nigeria Scheme, the official said the Federal Government planned to employ 500,000 graduates as teachers.
“Under the scheme, government will hire,
train and deploy the graduates to help beef up the quality of teachers
in public schools across the nation. The selection of the 500,000
teachers is likely to be on states and FCT basis,” he explained.
Under the youth employment agency, he
explained that between 300,000 and 500,000 non-graduate youths would be
taken through skill acquisition programmes and vocational training, for
which they would be paid stipends during the training.
The trainees, he said, would be expected
to become self-productive members of their communities. The selection
of the youths for this scheme, according to him, would also be per
states and the FCT.
On the Conditional Cash Transfer, the
official said government would pay N5,000 per month directly to one
million extremely poor Nigerians this year on the condition that they
had immunised children enrolled in schools.
While describing the CCT as the most misunderstood of the schemes, he clarified that it would only be for extremely poor people.
He also said the pilot scheme for the
homegrown school feeding would start with a number of states drawn from
across the country, and then developed to cover the entire country.
In the 2016 proposed budget, provision is said to have been made to implement this year on a pilot scheme basis.
He said the programme also had
international supports from the global community including the Imperial
College of the United Kingdom.
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