Federal govt releases details of programme to employ 774,000 Nigerians

Federal govt releases details of programme to employ 774,000 Nigerians

Federal govt releases details of programme to employ 774,000 Nigerians

 

The federal government has unveiled the details of its plan to employ at 1,000 persons from each of the 774 local government areas in the country.

The initiative will start October 1 and each beneficiary will be paid N20,000 monthly to carry out public works, the minister of state for labour and employment, Festus Keyamo, announced Thursday.

Mr Keyamo provided more details of the programme, saying each state will have a committee to choose those to be employed and the jobs they will perform.

He said political leaders in all areas will be allowed to select not more than 10 per cent of the beneficiaries in their areas.

Read Mr Keyamo’s speech at a press conference below:

PROTOCOLS

It is my singular honour and pleasure to welcome members of the Press to this briefing.

Sometime in October, 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, approved a Pilot Special Public Works Programme in the Rural Areas. The programme was domiciled in the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) for implementation.

The Special Public Works in the Rural Areas is an employment- intensive technique acquired and adapted by the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) from one of the capacity-building collaborations with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the late 1980’s to the middle of the 1990’s. The Project was tagged ILO/NDE Labour Based/ Light Equipment Methods of Construction, Rehabilitation and maintenance of Public Infrastructure.

The ILO itself derived this idea of Special Public Works programme from several historical templates. According to the Development and Technical Labour Department of the ILO, these types of programmes were used during the Great Depression by industrialised nations to immediately respond to grinding poverty at the lowest level of society that normally bore the brunt of such economic upheavals. It was also effectively used during colonial Africa to quickly respond to situations such as drought and famine by mobilising the unskilled populace to engage in other labour intensive infrastructural projects as a means of immediately alleviating their situation. The concept was later adopted and developed by most Asian countries like India, China and Bangladesh to lift their countries out of the league of poor nations. This programme was one of the main reasons India quickly dropped in the poverty index and Nigeria overtook India at a point.

 

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