This should be the last promise
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said last week that the first 200,000 unemployed graduates for teaching jobs under the Federal Government’s N-Power jobs programme would be hired before the end of this this month. This was the latest of a series of promises on the Federal Government’s promised social investment programmes.
The 200,000 unemployed graduates to be employed are out of the 5000,000 the Buhari administration plans to recruit. Osinbajo also said several states’ Home-Grown School Feeding programmes are expected come on stream before the end of this month. He said caterers and cooks will be hired to execute the programme in each state and that while the federal government would cater for pupils in primary 1-3, state governments shall cater for other classes. The Home-Grown School Feeding programme is another one of the social investment programmes that are expected to impact directly on the lives of Nigerian school-age children.
Speaking on the micro-credit scheme of the administration’s promised social welfare package, in which low-interest loans ranging from N60,000 to N100,000 would be given to more than one million artisans, traders and market women, Osinbajo said the scheme would also kick off this month. He said 1.5million women across the country would receive micro-credit loans through the Bank of Industry (BoI) before the end of this month.
It would be recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari announced some social intervention schemes last December when he presented the 2016 Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly. They include Teach Nigeria; Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT); Home-Grown School Feeding; Free Education for science and technology students in tertiary institutions; and Youth Empowerment Programme. The Teach Nigeria scheme is targeted at employing 500,000 graduate teachers to be trained and deployed to teach in primary schools.
Six months after the President assented to the 2016 budget,there are no signs of any of the schemes. It has been one promise after another from various government officials and spokespersons including the Minister of Labour and Employment, Minister of Information, Minister of Youth and Sports, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Social Welfare Programme (SWP) and the Minister of Agriculture, who recently promised that 30 million Nigerian school children will soon start getting a litre of milk each daily. Osinbajo’s promise is the latest of them, in which he categorically said 200,000 graduate teachers, the CCT and the school feeding programs would all become a reality this month.
Officials once said the absence of statistical data hampered the schemes’ implementation. Last January, the late Minister of State for Labour and Employment James Ocholi decried the lack of reliable data on the unemployed, without which he said the social protection schemes could not take off. Also blamed for the schemes’ slow take-off were poor planning and the economic recession that set in.
Government’s initial failure to articulate details of the welfare programmes, including a definition of the period each of the schemes will last, was part of the problems that caused implementation delays. Government also failed to articulate its strategic plans for the attendant challenges associated with increased school enrolment such as dilapidated structures, dearth of classroom furniture and dearth of instructional materials. If school feeding eventually leads to higher enrolment, what would be the effect of that if teachers remain poorly paid, are paid late or not paid at all for several months?
Three quarters of this fiscal year is already lost. Potential beneficiaries of the schemes are running out of patience with the incessant promises. The Federal Government is already looking like a 419ner in this respect. No excuse for the painful delay, including economic recession, is tenable to unemployed youths. We expect government to fulfil its pledge to recruit 200,000 teachers this month and proceed to employ the remaining 300,000 graduate teachers shortly thereafter. We are tired of promises. We want to see action.