Two Millions Nigerians Get N10 Billion Monthly Stipends, FG

The Federal Government has said it pays two million households N10 billion monthly.

The government explained that the households were captured under its Conditional Cash Transfer programme.

It was also revealed that over 10 million pupils benefit from its school feeding programme.

This was disclosed in Abuja by the National Coordinator of the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP), Dr Umar Bindr, during the NSIP annual strategic review meeting.

Speaking on its efforts to lift 100million Nigerians out of poverty, Bindr said: “We have more than 10 million applicants nationwide, but we have successfully managed to onboard 2 million, and we are consistently paying these households N5000 per month. The households have an average number of five to seven people.

“We are feeding an average of 10 million children nationwide. By the end of 2021, there were only two states that were not onboarded, Kwara and Bayelsa but I’m happy to report that they are now aligned, so we are nationwide.”

The government however admitted that it is faced with some challenges despite its efforts to curb poverty.

Bindr said: “The first challenge is that there are people who will try to scuttle the programme. There are reports whereby we see schools that don’t exist actually reported, we find this and we drop them from the list. There are situations where the number of pupils in schools is being inflated, we caught those, there are areas where the cooking is not taking place and then we are paying cooks, we also checkmate those.

“There are areas where the aggregators for the food are aggregating the wrong food and they are short-changing the children.

“Also on the NPower, there are some young people who don’t go to teach in the schools, we will catch those too and exit them.

“There are people who are supposed to be on the NAgro who are meant to be talking to farmers, they don’t go to farms. So this is a social programme, and it has its associated social challenges but the programme is well prepared and t is well digitised. We have data for every single beneficiary, and we track these beneficiaries very closely.”