Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is optimistic that N-Power Scheme introduced by President Muhammadu Buhari administration that has so far employed 500,000 persons would do more to reduce the number of unemployed Nigerians.
Osinbajo, who in his Twitter handle on Tuesday, January 1, re-tweeted “Imagine 500,000 people spread around 774 LGAs manning classrooms in public schools, acting as extension workers in our primary health centres, acting as agric extension advisors to farmers armed with devices pre-loaded with over 1 million resources.”
In November 2018, the Federal Government said would it expand the scheme from the current 500,000 to accommodate one million beneficiaries in the next phase.
The Vice President said that the expansion became necessary because of the successes recorded by the programme.
The government established the programme because of the growing need for government’s direct intervention in job creation.
Responding to a variety of questions at a town hall meeting in Abuja, the Vice President said that the programme would become the largest post-tertiary job scheme in Africa.
“The idea of N-Power is supposed to be government’s own programme of direct employment and training. At the moment, we have taken up to 500,000 and in the next phase we are looking at another 200,000 and closely followed by another 300,000.
“In all, we will be employing up to a million, and that will be the largest post-tertiary job programme in the entire Africa. The reason why we have done this is because of the employment problems that we have, we may not be able to engage everybody but at least government must give some direct provision of jobs.”
Osinbajo explained further that though government could not pay more than the N30,000 currently paid to beneficiaries and also fix all the unemployment issues, it is working on creating the enabling environment to ensure that beneficiaries as well as other unemployed Nigerians become useful to themselves.
“It is infrastructure that will create the opportunities to provide more jobs, especially through manufacturing and Industry.
