Nigeria govt begins payment of N30,000 stipend arrears to N-Power volunteers

- Afolabi Imokhuede has disclosed that about 174,000 N-power volunteers in the Federal Government’s Social Intervention Programmes (SIPs) have started receiving N30,000 monthly stipends

- Imokhuede says some of the volunteers cannot be paid because records show they were absent from verification

- He said what the government does on monthly basis is to send the records to NIBS

Afolabi Imokhuede, senior special assistant to the President Muhammadu Buhari on job creation, on Tuesday, May 23, said Nigerian government has paid Social Intervention Programmes (SIPs) about 86 per cent arrears.

Imokhukede made this known in Abuja that about 174,000 N-power volunteers in the Federal Government’s SIP have started collecting N30,000 out of the arrears.

Reports say there has been protest nationwide by beneficiaries clamouring for arrears which the government has now started paying.

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“Now, when I mean 86 per cent after physical verification, as at last count in end of April we had about 174,000 qualified, verified volunteers out of 200,000.

“We are currently right now doing a final reconciliation with all the states and FCT just to ensure, because we also found out that there were few cases of computation error, a few cases of omission at the point of digitizing the physical master list.

“The only ways we can know that; or some states get to know, is when these volunteers call the helpline or send e-mails complaining of non-payment.

“We then say to them; you cannot be paid because our records show that you are absent from verification,'' Imokhuede said.

He noted that most of the invalid verifications were caused by wrong Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) of the volunteers which could not be linked to the accounts they had submitted.

NAIJ.com gathered that a lot of them also applied in conformity with their certificates but a lot of such certificates were not in tandem with their BVN data.

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“All of those categories of volunteers always come out invalid. What we did, which is important, is make payments through the technology platform recognising that NIBS, (Nigerian Interbank Settling System), is the custodian of all the BVN in Nigeria.

“We brought in NIBS as a key stakeholder. What we do on monthly basis is to send the records to NIBS which does the validation; and those who pass through the validation have no issues and get their payments,’’ Imokhuede added.

He said the verifications were to protect the volunteers from fraud or being shortchanged by those who assisted them in entering into the programme through corrupt cyber cafés.

NAIJ.com had earlier reported that many Nigerians seemed to have bought into the vision of the Muhammadu Buhari administration through its initiative called 'N-Power', a social investment programme of the administration

According to the job creation unit in the presidency, over 400,000 successful registrations had been received since the commencement of the programme's registration.

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