N5,000 stipend: Nothing for nothing!
Successive Nigerian governments have never been found wanting in terms of providing inappropriate emergency short-term solutions to long-term problems! The decision to pay one million people N5,000 a month for one year under a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) scheme falls into this category. At face value the scheme should be commended because it demonstrates government’s concern over increasing poverty levels in the land. However, the problems associated with mass poverty have remained us despite every government expressing concern and implementing emergency solutions. As the rich in Nigeria get richer the poor get poorer.
The most visible manifestation of extreme poverty is the legions of beggars and destitute roaming around. If the new initiative was designed to get them off the streets it would have had a definite goal and measurable impact. But paying selected individuals N5,000 per month is simply playing to the gallery. The amount is far less than the daily feeding allowance of a member of the National Assembly! A bag of rice now costs N22,000 so what can anybody be expected to do with N5,000 a month which translates to less than N200 per day? It’s clear that even the most unsuccessful beggar wouldn’t agree to give up the profession to collect such a meagre monthly sum. In view of the fact that the poorest and most destitute in our society won’t benefit then who will? Becoming a beneficiary isn’t a straight forward matter. It isn’t enough to be poor and destitute, you must be captured in a so-called “community mobilisation identification and selection process”.
It’s from this registration process that a “social register” is compiled from which beneficiaries are selected. Government claims this “social register” is a result of “tried and tested” community based targeting methods developed by the World Bank. This implies quite incorrectly that the World Bank knows best, and that they have always proposed successful solutions to Third World problems. Inexplicably the whole process takes no cognisance of the fact that the poorest in Nigeria live in makeshift structures and on the streets not in registerable households. The requirement that beneficiaries must operate a bank account and possess a Bank Verification Number (BVN) further disqualifies the poorest people in Nigeria who neither operate bank accounts nor have BVN’s.
Furthermore, virtually all government registration process in Nigeria whether it be for Driving License, Tax Clearance, National Identification Card, or Permanent Voter Card (PVC) is fraught with irregularities, delays, errors and inefficiencies and there is no reason to think CCT registration will be any different. Authorities have proved themselves incapable of ending the scandalous crime of government payroll fraud inexplicably called “Ghost workers”. What is the guarantee that there will be no ghost poor?
According to the World Bank model, the scheme isn’t meant to eradicate poverty in its entirety, but simply cushion the impact of adverse economic situations. Even so, paying people N5,000 for doing nothing is no solution to our socioeconomic problems. It defies logic for government to borrow money in order to finance their deficit budget and then proceed to give the money away for no productive purpose! It would have made far more sense to employ beneficiaries to clean the environment or do some useful parttime job.
The CCT scheme has already commenced in Borno State’s Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps with biometric capture and account opening. This begs the question of how a temporary IDP camp can be a permanent address? Is government unable to foresee a situation in which the IDP’s will be able to return home soon? It’s also pertinent to ask what exactly the IDP’s are supposed to do with the money? Are there stores and other facilities in the camps where people make profit from the IDP’s? At the end of the day would it not have been better to give a lump sum to every IDP who is leaving a camp to resettle and rebuild their lives? That an individual is poor doesn’t mean he or she doesn’t have the skills necessary to create wealth if adequately funded. N5,000 no longer has the same value as when the pledge was made and there are many who believe it makes far more sense to give beneficiaries a one-off “reasonable” amount to enable them undergo vocational training and start a trade. The old adage that it’s better to teach a man how to fish than to give him fish to eat is very apt here.
As currently configured the program can’t possibly do anything other than squander the nations finances without visible returns. Government has earmarked N5 Trillion to pay beneficiaries for twelve months after which its back to square one. Even though N5 Trillion is a lot of money each person still only gets N5,000 per month which is nothing. Expecting this to be beneficial to the nation in any way is wishful thinking. As the saying goes the only thing you get for nothing is nothing!