The
Nigerian government is set to introduce a social safety net that would
allow millions of poor citizens enjoy cash backups to meet their basic
socio-economic needs, the Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala,
announced Tuesday.
The minister, who disclosed this in Abuja
during her appearance on the Ministerial Platform to brief the media on
the programmes of her ministry, said arrangements towards the take-off
of the scheme were being finalized.
Unlike
several other countries, Nigeria presently runs no social security
package for either the poor, unemployed, aged or women. Only a few
states, such as Ekiti and Ogun, provide monthly support to the aged.
The outgone Fayemi government paid N5,000 monthly to the elderly.
Bills pushing for government support to unemployed and aged Nigerians have remained stuck in the National Assembly for years.
Details of the new plans announced by the finance minister are not clear yet.
Mrs.
Okonjo-Iweala merely said the proposed Social Safety Net would be
specifically targeted at the rural poor and would serve as a financial
support to help beneficiaries send their children to school and access
primary health care, amongst others benefits.
The minister said
already the scheme has already undergone experimentation in Kano State
to see how useful it would be in sending the girl-child to school.
The result so far, she said, has showed remarkable leap in girls’ enrollment in schools in the area.
Mrs.
Okonjo-Iweala said the government would expand the scope and extend
cash access to poor families to enable them to move up from the poverty
trap to get their children educated and get their health index right.
“Government
has asked an Inter-Ministerial Committee headed by the Ministry of
Finance to work on this issue,” she said. “So as we speak, we are
looking at what is called a Social Safety Net, which is designed to
bring people at the bottom in poverty up. We are looking at various
mechanisms, the biggest social safety net is jobs.”
She said the
government would also be focusing on sectors that were not creating
jobs fast enough, to replace them with other programmes capable of
supporting the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P)
to create jobs for more people to save Nigerians from hand-outs.
Credit: Bassey Udo
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