In this interview with the Special Adviser to the President on Social Protection Scheme, Maryam Uwais, she told BusinessDay’s Elizabeth Archibong that the scheme has become a success in a very short time.
How has the social protection Programme of the Federal Government fared so far?
Well, there are some good stories and there are some difficult stories. It’s been a challenge but it’s also been quite fulfilling knowing that we have been able to make some impact AROUND THE COUNTRY.
There have been challenges of course because people are used to using Programmes like this for political patronage, people want to predetermine those who will be selected as a beneficiary even if it’s N-power they want to give the list, they feel a sense of entitlement. But the administration is determined to give everybody an opportunity, you don’t need to know anybody you just apply, which is why we did a portal for these applications and where we have issues of connectivity
we address the governors and the National Assembly. You can download forms in your own community, have people complete the forms but you must upload the information onto the portal. We will only deal with applications online so that no one can say I have been marginalized, my form was destroyed or they sold the form to me. So this is why it was adopted.
Initially we had concerns because of the connectivity issues but then just thinking about graduates, how did they apply for JAMB? And then when you think of what happened with the immigration saga, putting people together physically. We are trying as much as possible to retain the funds that we have for our beneficiaries rather than use them for logistics,overheads etc.
So we deliberately maintain a very lean team at the federal level. We try very hard to ensure that our programmes are driven by the states. So we don’t ask the states to give us counterpart funding but we ask the states to give us human beings, personnel that can work with us the states will pay their salaries. So we work with civil servants that have been existing because we are impacting education, health, agriculture which constitutionally belongs to the states anyways. It’s just that the administration just has to be concerned about them.
So we work for the primary schools which belong to the local government and see how this can impact on enrolment. So the states need to take ownership while we pay the beneficiaries. And what we have done in our Programme is to ensure that each beneficiary opens an account, and each beneficiary has a BVN. BVN is an evolution because it cuts out fraud, duplications, corruption. With this, people cannot collect money twice.
Given the number of people that apply, how do you sieve out the final beneficiaries?
I mean each Programme is different. Selection of beneficiaries happen in different ways for each Programme. With the N-Power is the portal, they apply. The first time we opened the N-Power portal we had over 700,000 apply and we selected 200,000. I think people were skeptical, they didn’t believe it would happen. We had responses from each local government only that it varies. Some local government two people while in another local government 20,000. But we had applicants from the 774 local government areas. What we did first in selecting was to conduct an online test based upon which we now selected 200,000. While some states had 50,000, some states had less than a thousand. We needed the persons to apply because you are volunteering to serve in a community as a teacher, agricultural extension worker, healthcare worker. So when you apply you put in the BVN, your details and why you are interested.
So unless you apply we won’t know that you exist and we have to work with the number of applicants. First and foremost there was a cut-off mark, 30 percent of the applicants will go to the state. Then we topped up for the northeast. For states like Zamfara, Bayelsa and Sokoto they had really low numbers, we gave them 90 per cent still they were just only 2,000. We topped up for gender, we topped up for physical disabilities still there were disparities. Because if you don’t have the numbers we can’t just allocate and that was an issue because the National Assembly took us up that we needed to allocate. But how do we allocate if you did not apply, how do we know your BVN number, how do we know where you want to serve. So we now selected this 200,000 using that and then send to Nigeria Inter Bank Settlement System (NIBSS). NIBSS is working like our enterprise management office, you know they host the server of the BVN. They went through everything and checked and came back with 93 per cent success rate. So the 93 per cent of people on this list are authentic. We have accounts and their dates of birth matches. When you apply you must also put your phone number and so we sent text message to the number to say you have been selected. And then we send each state a list of those from that state.
We had asked the governors to give us one focal person that we can liaise with in their state. The focal person is essentially to coordinate what happens because we are working on agriculture, education and health ministries. All the commissioners, the SUBEB chair are appointees of the governor and so it has to be someone who can escalate any bottlenecks,the publicity etc. If we are coming to the state we tell the focal person what we want and he or she organize what happens. So instead of sending staff to verify from here with DTA, overheads, logistics and all of that, we sign MOUs with National Orientation Agency (NOA), because they have community mobilization unit in every local government. We sign an agreement with the NYSC to give us assistants, we sign MOU with chairmen of SUBEB, Chairmen of agriculture development unit in every state and the state’s primary health care agencies, to sit down and verify so these people actually live here. It is not about state of origin it is about where you live. Because what we pay is N30, 000 per month and if you live out of the vicinity you can’t cope. This is a service and we can’t pay for accommodation. And there has been some bone of contention because some states governors have said they want indigenes and we said start your own employment Programme and pay them but this federal government Programme is going to be for any citizen of Nigeria living anywhere.
You can’t dictate because if this person is willing to teach your school then you should even thank the person. Because we found some schools with 300, 400 students and no teachers, just the headmaster and they are lucky if NYSC send corpers. It is terrible so we needed to have SUBEB chairs there because they will know the pupils- teacher ratio and will know how many N-Teach that should be sent to that school.
So they will first verify that qualifications are authentic because those selected were asked to go on a particular day with their original certificates and verify that they are between the ages of
18-35 and that they are unemployed and that they live in those vicinities. Also the NYSC corps as well as the NCE holders and so they actually get back to us with the list of those that have been verified. I then raise a memo to Budget and Planning which warehouses the money. I don’t see the money. So I raise the memo with the verified list sent to me, saying these are the people, these are the account numbers, so pay. So budget and planning sends the money to NIBSS which now pays.
As media people you have heard protests. Initially up to about March, we had paid up to 87 per cent but the 13 percent that haven’t been paid were very upset clearly. I went physically to meet them in the states. It turns out the states sent us letters saying these people didn’t turn up because they want indigenes and so they substitute the names with whoever it is they want to put there. But we have a list.So we sent the list with the names they sent to us and they don’t match the names with NIBSS and so NIBSS doesn’t pay them.Meanwhile the states have told this new people that you have been selected. So the new people and the old people who are authentic people were protesting.
So, in one of the states I had to tell them, I won’t lie to you we are going to open the portal again. Those of you whom the state have informed that you have been selected, you have not been selected is only the people that got the text from us who have been selected. So we will send another team from Abuja to come and verify because we have been told you did not turn. Of course we also have cases of married women whose name have been changed,and surprisingly some graduates don’t know the difference between surname and middle name.
And you know banks they don’t waste time if it doesn’t match they just return it.
So far we have done about 93 per cent, we have amended the records and a lot of them are being paid. We have very good stories coming out.
They are some who are volunteers, they are very brazen about it, they don’t go to work. The states have no control because we pay them. So we are taking those people out.
So we have got a monitor now, she has also gone to ActionAid, ask them to select civil society for us. Adverts went out I think in March for civil society to engage and they have already been selected. Every NGO from the state has demonstrated that it has six community based organizations that it is affiliated to. So we are setting up with the monitoring structures and we are bringing in chairman of SUBEB. If the chairman says you worked for six days we are paying for six days. We also found others who over the period have not been paid but have still been coming to work. There are these three girls we found in Delta State, they worked in the pharmacology and microbiology labs as students, they didn’t have work. So they set up a mini-laboratory and they are doing blood tests. We also found a visually impaired person who applied and he got the job and is now doing brail in Plateau State. There is a lady in Delta who agreed to work in a school. She said she just wants this job and is ready to sleep in the school for five days and go home at weekends. And luckily for us,she was there when fire broke out and she saved all the children. So there are good stories of people really making something of their lives, setting up farms.
But there are all kinds of challenges because people have a mind set of doing things and the way I see it, this is a process and with time people will understand that they can’t cheat the system, we are just making sure we put in checks.
So we just closed the portal for the second batch. The last time we opened the portal for three months and we had over 700,000 apply and now we open for six weeks 2.5 million people apply and we are only going to select 300,000. Of this 300,000 the budget can only pay 150,000 this year. So the balance of 150,000 picked from the portal will be paid next year.
Because we have significant numbers now, we are trying to see how we can balance some of the disparities. We are trying to take a certain number per constituency. There are some states that have 150,000/180,000 applicants while others have 40,000. For those that have 40,000 we will take 20 per cent while those that have 150,000/180,000 we will take two per cent.
What will be the criteria to drop some?
The exams. Even the exams we did in Kaduna, the governor said some of the N-Teach cannot speak English I can’t unleash them on primary school students. So I am going to do my own test apart from your own that you did and will select them. So we asked we have a certain number to be taken so what do we do with them, he said we should send them to the agriculture Programme. There are some states that refused to even have engagements with our programmes because we had sent text that you have been selected but they started protesting, they went to the speaker of their states house of assembly that they have been selected, so they forced their leaders to actually sit down and do something.
We have discovered that there are some states whose focal persons have not even deployed but they have been telling us that they have deployed. So, is not the fault of those engaged and so we are writing the governors in the affected states to change the focal persons because they are not effective, you are short changing your own services if that continues.
The conditional cash transfer for the poor raised a bit of dust last year. What is happening?
That has been very slow. One of our biggest challenge with the conditional transfer has been who do we pay? The people that have been paid in the past have not necessarily been the poorest of the poor. They have been people who are on the same political party and they are being rewarded for loyalty. For some it is kinship. So first thing we did was to look around and see what kind of process that is really fair and can get us to those poor people so that we are actually be able to reduce poverty. Unless you target people that are poorest you can’t make a difference in the indices.
So first and foremost what we do is geographical mapping. Our funds for this year can only cover a third of this country, a third of the state and a third of each senatorial district. So from here we have a poverty mapping of each state and we are taking the poorest local government in each senatorial district. We share that with the states and we got a consensus because if you don’t get that consensus you will get a push back. And when you put your own staff there you get a push back. That is what happened with some of the last programmes, federal send their staff to work at states and there was a push back. States wanted information, federal wanted information but they didn’t share. So now we said we will compel the states to get their people and we will work with them.
So we signed an MOU so the states know what their responsibilities are and the federal know what their responsibilities are. Then we set up an office called SOCO – States Operations Coordinating Office. So that has to be sited in the state ministry of planning and then they will give us people in the ministry of planning that we can work with. We actually screen them.They also give us people from the local government that we call local government facilitators.We are trying to build capacity within the civil service because if tomorrow there is no money, the states know what to do. We go in there and we train them in the community based targeting process.
For instance let’s say we are going into communities in Katsina-Ala,we go in there say on Tuesday and meet with religious leaders, district heads and all the gatekeepers and tell them we are coming on saturday, bring your people as many as you can but you must constitute them into focal groups so that we can have discussions with them. The women together, the youths together, the men together, however they are comfortable because if you put women and men together, the women in some cultures will not say a word throughout.
They say they are 50 million people living below the poverty line in this country. If we say everyone is below poverty line, first of all we won’t be able to manage the numbers, secondly some places are poorer than others. Our own is that we need to be equitable, we will go around every community in this country and try and give the same amount of attention. In every community you have poor people whether in Lagos or Bama, so we ask the community what is poverty to you in this context? Once they defend the parameters, which households falls under this parameters, we ask for households rather than people because we can pick more than four people from each households and we are trying to spread. After that discussion we have a plenary and we will read out the names and if a household name appears more than once then we know for sure that this person need help,if it is once we ask what do you think?It also removes grievances so that anyone that is not supposed to be on that list will be removed.So we are putting out call centers now so people can call and give us information. Somebody can call and say that household looks poor but the father is just a miser because he has sons or daughters abroad sending him money. Or this person is on pension. We are looking for people who are really poor due to lack or stigmatized. You know how our people can be, can be stigmatized for HIV, leprosy etc. so such people can come forward and say we have lost out. We will now visit those ones with a device that has a proxy means testing formula and we will ask questions, who is the head of the house, how many children are in the house, how many are in school, what is your income if any etc. the device automatically ranks them as the poorest to the least poor. So, though we have no control over each number the community will throw up, and in a local government you have up to 12 communities we will visit all the communities that are on the map working with population commission. At the end of the day we have budgetary constraints, we are going round the entire country because in some states the focal persons are slow, we are taking 80 households per ward and each ward can be up to eight communities. So we take the 80 poorest because is already automatically provided in the device and so we visit each households, take the BVN, open accounts for the caregiver and ask the head of the households, just to balance the culture, we ask the head of the households who is the alternate. Our function is to address their consumption needs and it is the woman who goes to the market, who feeds the children etc.
You know its funny the cash transfer is N5,000 a month but I have seen some households in this country where N2,500 made a huge difference.
You know you actually come out feeling guilty that you buy recharge cards with such amount. Those women do so much with that money, they save, you can see their children are healthier and the home is more harmonious. There is a village we went to, the men told us that because of the herdsmen clashes they have stopped going to farms and if not that the woman was getting this money they would have been dead. So its a cash transfer from malnutrition, so right from the time she conceives, until she has the baby and the baby is two years old, she gets N2,500 per month. And the women say at times they give their husbands N500 and still she saves. At the end of that period the were able to buy a goat or something that will generate additional income.
On pay day we will have cookery, information on nutrition. We asked the women if their husbands take the money from them and they said it happened initially but because we have sensitized the district heads, gatekeepers, a lot of people now intervened. And the men say, we are so much better off because of this money. We actually pay 10,000 every two months.
The World Bank had entered into agreement with eight states and they had registers containing the names, number, BVN of those eligible for the cash transfers and those are the people we started paying in these eight states. Because we could identify and we knew that they were poor. Now we have started development register for 12 other states. So that has to be the condition for that cash transfers. All our beneficiaries are on that register. And this is why we put this Programme in the planning ministry of each state because the state would want to know about these people and the information should be accessible to them. We have segregated the data , female headed households, physical disabilities etc. All of these are there are are domiciled in NIPS and we call it the national social register. But the dearth of banking infrastructure has proved to be a challenge. Banks only go where there is profit, where there is business. So this is the challenge and we have had to engage mobile money operators to go in and pay those women in their communities. Issues that are evolving we keep addressing them. You know some of those women don’t have self esteem so their husbands collect the money from them hence our insisting that accounts be open for them. So they can save, do business and owning a bank account means they will automatically have a NIN number.
The overall focus of this administration is to bring people as much as possible to a formal economy. They are becoming visible so it is easier for us to plan. So that is what has slowed down our process but we have to get the targeting right for us to be able to make a difference in people’s lives. This is irrespective of who you voted for, you may not even have voted, ethnicity, religion, our audial suspects. This for Nigerians who need help and so there is a bond between the government and the governed.
During the Programme we had, one of the HMOs told us of a woman who came with her husband and 3 sons to collect N10,000 and she came with a Ghana Must Go bag because she has never seen such an amount before.
When they asked her what the bag was for she said she has never seen N10,000 before and she just wanted to be sure she can carry it. When she was given she couldn’t count neither was her husband and three sons. In the end they had to call somebody who explained to her what she could do with that money. She was praying and thanking God.
So apart from the money we are organizing them into cooperatives, giving them life skills, giving them information on nutrition because we know who they are. In every ward we have HMOs so the primary health care agency said we want to select at least 20 of them as entry point into the community and train them as village health workers so that they can talk to other women about hygiene, sanitation and safe water.
Just like the N-Power, the ministry of finance and FIRS approached us and said our process is transparent and requested for 7,500 around the country, they trained them on tax and they are now helping them with tax collections in the states.
Some of the states as a matter of fact have said some of them will be employed permanently because of the knowledge they have. So they are disengaging from N-Power because they have got permanent employment.
But the idea really isn’t for government to run this forever but the idea is for them to take ownership of their lives. So we have now given them devices which are being distributed through Bank of Industry (BOI). They are six or seven devices providers that actually exist like Samsung, HP, Lennox, Zenox,etc. we told them the specifications, we develop content on teaching and on some subjects.
We sat down with the ministry of agriculture and signed an MOU, The ministry of agriculture sat down with the private sector to know what they need, so they developed the content. Because we want to know what the private sector need from construction so they develop operational manuals and they have been training the beneficiaries of N-power Agric. Some say they want them to know seedlings, how to enumerate seedlings, take pictures of any disease and send it immediately etc.
So that is in the device. The same goes for the healthcare person. We are putting in the information on the devices. They devices have just started arriving and there have GPS and will be able to tell us where they have been between 8am and 4pm and actually informs us if they are going where they are meant to be.
All of these is a lot of work but it is also very fulfilling that you can do something in such a large scale.
Are the devices going to be theirs at the end of the Programme?
Yes. It is one of the device that they will need to add N1000 if they want it for keeps and that is HP because its very expensive. But others, government is paying for them.
What’s the latest on the Home Grown School Feeding Programme?
We are targeting all public primary school students in a bid to ramp up enrolment because five to 13 million children are out of school.
So we are giving one hot nutritious meal in the schools. We pay the cooks directly, the selection of the cooks is done by the states because they know which school exist. We can’t impose. We held a stakeholders workshop with the ministers of Agriculture, education, health and women affairs, SUBEB Chairmen. The Programme is called home grown so we are looking for food that is accessible in that state. So what is cocoyam, yellow cassava, grains, rice etc, we encouraged the states to form them into groups so you can buy directly because the budget is N70 per meal. Some states are doing it at N50 interestingly but if you have a poultry association for instance and they know they don’t need to take their eggs to the market and that they have a buyer and the money is going to come every 20 days, they are willing to bring their price down. We are doing that so from N35 is coming down to N28. They are actually coordinating them putting the diary people in the group with those supplying directly to the schools. At least you know you have a sustainable income on that.
So after the selection we train them on hygiene, business and the states kits them with materials, right shoes and all of that. So the states then get their BVN and open accounts for them. We are not taking old accounts because we don’t know if she has taken a loan before, so we open new accounts for them. The state selects the bank because they know the banks that have branches scattered around the states and the agents that can go an pay. So once the information comes to us we now send it to budget and planning which in turn pays them directly.
There are challenges I won’t lie. Some of the cooks thought they will be paid lots of money but when I tell them its N70 per plate they draw back. They think its big contacts. We have people coming to us that they want to be supplying this or that and we say go to the states because the states know what the budget is.
I will not tell one state use this don’t use that. You just go and if the state says N70 you just deal with the states directly. Some of the states selected party faithfuls, some say we want only our party women, our supporters but these are big women and this is the problem.
When you call them you get response like “is it because of this small money?” So they don’t care. In some states we discovered that the states officials were conniving with the bank, they will pay the women the entire money and so the women that were even conscientious were giving the children biscuits. Meanwhile, we had sat down to draw up a balanced diet menu with the state that will boost the nutrition of the child. So just going to monitor we are finding this out. Some children are really happy that they are being fed. If you do it the way we planned it, it would work but if you put your own people it won’t work.
Some states engage the mothers of the children to cook which is so much easier. There was one state we visited and we called one of the cooks and she was saying the primary school is too far from where she is living. We told her we were monitors and we were at the school waiting, it took her over an hour to come. How can you be cooking for primary school students and you living over an hour away?
When it comes to selection we want women who are known as credible in that vicinity so that they can do it seamlessly and supply without any problem.
How many states are you in now?
Now we are in 13 states but we had to stop twice because we had problems with banks etc. I must say anytime I have approached the governors with the report they have been disgusted. You just have to trust someone because its like taking food out of the mouth of children.
We are also linking the children to the nearest primary health care centers because we are enumerating them and then deworming them twice a year. Even if you tell us that the children are 13,000 we will still count them to be sure. So we are using the opportunity to know the number of children in the school. We told the states that every cook should be cooking for between 70 and 150 children because we want to be able to measure between quality and quantity. So those are our rules but of course some states are flaunting those rules but I keep saying its a process. The governors we have made complains to have taken actions and we have seen improvements.
Has the enrolment increased?
Oh yes. It is actually making the people to sit up. When I appear on radio programmes callers ask why are you not providing uniforms, books, sandals and I say that is not our mandate. That is the responsibility of the states, we can’t usurp the states functions.
So the states are now seeing that the number of children coming into the Programme have increased and so they have to make provisions for classrooms, is taking time but is pushing them into taking actions for what is their responsibilities. They have to account for teachers. We find a lot of N-Teach because the teachers are going in to teach.
How far has GEEP gone?
The Government Enterprises Entrepreneurship Programme(GEEP) are meant for people that are at the lower rank of the financial pyramid that just need little money anything between N10,000 and N100,000 and it is given to cooperatives. So if it’s farmers or artisans you apply for it as a cooperative. You get the money directly if you have the BVN but you have to belong to a cooperative because we screen and verify that you belong to a cooperative because that cooperative serves as a collateral, we don’t ask for collateral except for the fact that the leadership will endorse you as credible that you will pay. And if you default the entire cooperative suffers so it is like pressure for you to pay up. And if you don’t pay back you won’t get another loan because we are working with NIBSS. We charge 5 per cent flat fee for our aggregators because we hire aggregators that we pay to go and collect the money. So if you take N50,000 loan for instance, you pay back 52,500 at the end of six months. The challenge is that we had thought people with small businesses will apply but the people we are giving this money to are those who are setting up cooperatives for the purpose of this loan. So they need training. It is not that they want to chop the money but they need to be trained so that at the end of the day you spend out of your funds. So we are trying to train them on that now. Groups come up to us and say we have found our funding and want to help you to train these women so that they have the confidence, they can assert themselves, they don’t dash the money out or use it for their daughter’s wedding.
How many people have you given loans to so far?
We have given over 90,000 loans in 31 states and the FCT. The ministry of women affairs, commerce, local governments are all involved as advocates, people pay N5,000 or N6,000 to register. We give it to our agents and the agents are paid through BOI. We ask them to upload the documents on to the site.
How many have received the conditional cash transfers?
So far we have 70,000 that we have paid but we are going to start paying another 70,000 to 200,000 by this August our target is one million by the end of this year. But some states are slower than others because we have had challenges of infighting. Though we are eight months gone we will do it. By September we should have 650,000 with the way we are going collecting the funds. It’s just been slow because we are using trainers that have been trained before to go to
other states and train. And you know proximity is an issue. We have ordered for these devices for the PMT so that we give to the young people, it took us six to seven months to get the device. But in the end world bank got some, some states started buying their own.
So we have the households but we can’t start paying.
What do you intend to achieve between now and end of the year?
Last year we didn’t get any money at all until October before we started putting together the things we wanted to do. Then getting people to be sensitive to the things we are doing. We left it for the focal persons. One of the weaknesses we have in the framework I will be quick to admit is that we didn’t give the focal persons terms of reference and some state governors gave us people who were just political affiliates who couldn’t even do ICT work.
So we call the focal persons for meetings regularly to update them, discuss challenges and all that but they were not doing anything. So now I have the contacts of one or two governors wives I will plead with them to tell their husbands to change these focal persons. So we have now sat down and drawn up terms of reference, the minimum qualification is that the focal person must be a graduate, technical expertise, must have Knowledge in ICT and must have passion for the job. So those people are the ones now being replaced because what I have discovered is that the Programme is as good as the focal persons.
And we have some focal persons that have passion for another Programme against the other but we keep reiterating that each one has a different impact, target and objectives on different places so you have to just help everybody, you can’t be selective.
Where are you headed for by the end of the year?
We plan to do one million beneficiaries before the end of this year on this cash transfers. Even the Acting President is interested in this. Once we get them on that register because we have to get that foundation right, once we have that it would be smooth. We will just be paying as we get them on. Last year they said they will give us N500 billion but they only gave us N80 billion. The money is not there especially with this recession.
This year they have given us N400 billion. On N-power devices alone we spend N9 billion every month now with the 200,000 on board already. We are starting a Programme in ICT this September for junior ones in school. We are trying to put computers in one primary and one secondary schools in each senatorial district and we are training our N-Teach with ICT backgrounds on matters to do with animations, graphics, script writing and all those things so that we can train our children. Because you know technology is the only way you can get a skill so that we can get our children who are sharp interested from that level. And any school that has more than 20 computers in their school we are willing to give them teachers. We are trying to do that to ensure more and more people are captured with the technology bug so that we are able to transform our society.
How much has been released so far?
N80 billion has been released for the 2016 budget. Now we are asking for more because for the end of this three months we don’t have sufficient funds. We have asked for a minimum of N40 billion every month though in a month like August it will be N27 billion because the children will be on holidays then. Going by the number of students in states we are feeding we can’t afford to slow down now. Now that the students are closing for holidays we are trying to use the N-Teach to do enumeration, translation of some of our manuals from English to dialects where they reside. It is just basic, we are just trying to find ways that will help some of the women who cannot speak English because they (N-teach) will get paid anyways.
So for this year N400 billion has been budgeted for the Programme while the remaining N100 billion is being utilised as seed money for Nigeria’s Housing Fund. That is Nigeria’s contribution to the fund. So we have had to scale down by 20 per cent all our beneficiaries to be able to fit into the budget.
Are there special plans for IDPs?
This is what they asked us, especially in the North East. PCNE is there, it has a budget, a lot of the ministries have monies for that area.
What we have done is that for NPower we give like 1200 more to Borno State because they have those challenges but for us to say that we are going to give them more just like that it is unless the Acting President says that. We have been told that this is a Nigerian project. There is another initiative. The Bama Initiative, money is being put there and of course we are using our own military, nurses, doctors and teachers to rebuild the place. It is going to be on a portal and people are going to apply. I think it may even be on our NPower portal and people are going to apply because the salary is going to be so much higher. There is hardship allowance, you will have a teacher earning something like three hundred thousand if you are willing to go and work there for two years.
The rebuilding, we have very good work soldiers that do it. They are the people that are digging in, mobilising police, civil defence. So we are trying to see what we can do with our own money to rebuild the communities because really government failed in those communities.
That is the truth, people got killed, there should have been a stronger presence. Look at what happened in Buni Yadi, it is a terrible story. I attended a unity school in 1971, I used to go by rail, they were safe. I was so tiny but my mother just used to put me on that train and that is how I went to Queens College and came back.
Even the Chibok School, I have been to Bama and the things you see there, when I came back I said we need to document this. Not one house standing how did tho happen. How did we let this happen?
On the sustainability of this programme?
Other countries that started this programme, started with a small initiative like this. I am hoping that when the public realise that this is transparent and this is impactful, no government will be able to sideline it, it will be a campaign promise that we will continue.
Apart from that we are looking at other avenues. I have got these researchers looking at how can we raise money? I want to address the private sector about their CSR, you can be sure that the money is going where it should. Let us see how we can leverage on that. Like now we are talking to NESAl and others trying to aggregate the social value in government so as to reduce cost for us so that we can sustain it. If we build capacity in the states and the state like what we are doing, they will buy in, if they see the impact of what we do but it will take time. So it is a lot of different things. Some of the monies that they recovered from the family of Abacha is coming to cash transfers. The Swiss government said they have to see that it goes back because monies that were sent before were squandered according to them. So they said they want to monitor, we are ready, anybody can monitor because we have nothing to hide.
