Prof. Nentawe Goshwe Yilwatda is the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation. In this interview, he speaks on the various programmes that have been lined up by the ministry to eradicate poverty, efforts being put in place to address the issue of corruption and trust deficit, why he is prioritising youth empowerment, among others. Excerpts:
What is your ministry doing regarding effective management of victims of disaster?
The figures are staggering, and this is the reason we are having the issues you raised. First is the issue of climate change. This year we have a lot of communities that were affected, from Borno to Adamawa to Bauchi, to the North West, Kano into Zamfara and so many states, including Jigawa, were affected by flooding. It is the same way from the River basin in River Niger and River Benue, the flooding along these banks right down into Bayelsa State. A lot of farmlands were destroyed by flooding. It is estimated that a lot of people that are affected by this flooding and climate change don’t have their farms insured and because they don’t have an insurance scheme they are going to be deeply affected by poverty and malnutrition.
We also have those communities that because of poor rainfall, especially in the far north, the effect of desertification is affecting them. So the crops may not do well because of the issue of climate change and the government has seen that as a primary issue that we need to address. And we have those people that have been affected by insurgency in some communities.
We are improving in terms of those communities being covered and most places that in some years ago we couldn’t farm in them.
Last year we did geo-mapping and special distribution in the farming communities in the north especially. We have improved in terms of the number of communities that have been recovered and the number of farmlands that people can penetrate, and they can farm now. But we have the issue of communities that are still affected and the issue of those we need to take care of.
“We want to target about 70 million households with N75, 000 per person this year. If we are able to get that 15 million people as a target and we pay each of them N75, 000 that will help them in several ways”
If you don’t mention the number feeling the impact of the interventions it will just be reports that we can’t do anything with, how many lives have been impacted?
Last year in October and November we were able to give five million people the first tranche of the conditional cash transfer across the country and then we gave the second tranche to 1.4 million households.
The reason why the number of people receiving the cash has decreased is because the president directed, based on new regulations, that before any payment is made to an individual, they must have a digital identity so that we can trace them. That is the NIN. So, we are doing data capturing but for now the poorest of the poor that we have their database, only 1.4 million of them have digital identity, that we can trace them using NIN.
Already we are working with NIMC and we are deploying. We are doing training. NIMC brought devices for us under a programme with the World Bank to assist us to do data capturing for people who don’t have NIN. Already we are training in some states like Rivers, Kwara, Abuja, Nasarawa, Kano and some few states across the country. We are deploying those states as the first round and by the end of January we would have deployed in all 36 states across the country to ensure that we harvest the NIN of up to 18.1 million Nigerian households that we need to capture as fast as possible so that we can make payments to them that is conditional cash transfers.
The target of the president is that we should target 15 million households, and the average household is about four to five. We want to target about 70 million households with N75, 000 per person this year. If we are able to get that 15 million people as target and we pay each of them N75,000 that will help them in several ways. We are going to train them on financial literacy that will help them to either start small businesses, or go into agriculture. It will help them to buy farm inputs and help to improve and expand our farms and help to expand their businesses and it will support them in no small measure at that level so that we can see improvement in production in the country that is one step we are taking. The second step is working with the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) also, people that are displaced.
What did you meet on ground, and what is the state of the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs in poverty reduction?
What we met was that there was a suspension of all the programmes pending the arrival of a minister. Mark you; the Permanent Secretary can only approve a maximum of N30 million on a project. So, most of the projects were suspended until my arrival.
Some of them have done the tender board meetings, and they were waiting for my concurrence to give approval for those projects to take off. We are actually executing most of them and implementing most of them. We are going to run some programmes that have to do with youth development. For the youth development programme we have an intervention that was given to us in the budget for last year. In that intervention we are implementing the empowerment of the youths, automobile, renewable energy and agriculture and we are doing that across all the 36 states.
This programme will run this year and we felt that since we are already doing this year because we couldn’t implement last year and we allow them to be implemented in June. So most of the projects we couldn’t implement last year we are implementing them this year, then there will be continuity for the next budget line, not this budget for this year, that is why it seemed there was no continuity.
Considering the state of the nation should we really be spending over N300 million on furniture for the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs?
We have new agencies that are coming up that have no accommodation before. They have no offices before so we are moving them to new locations. We are asking for new offices to be given to them. Even my office where it is now, it has been allocated to the Ministry of Communications, so we are moving to another floor different from the one that has been allocated to us. They allocated a new set of offices to the ministry and so we are refurnishing those new offices. That is why you saw that level of furniture in the ministry. Can you put that across to the N500 billion that was allocated. N550 billion is going straight into the people in terms of interventions in different forms, school feeding programmes and also major programmes that have to do with conditional cash transfer. I think that is the focus of the ministry. If you look at the distribution of the funding, you will discover that over 99 percent of the fund is actually going directly to the people.
However, a lot of people have said that they don’t feel the impact of the ministry. They talk about the conditional cash transfer, the social register, so what is the state of these things. The cash transfer is an easy way for money to go missing, what are some of the wider interventions to ensure sustainability, that Nigerians are not just lifted out of poverty, but are able to stand in their two feet rather than waiting for handouts and cash transfers, what are the efforts that you have put in place to ensure that you avoid these pitfalls?
The first step we have taken is that there is no physical distribution of cash to anybody again. You will never see anybody in the ministry distributing cash to anybody in the market spaces, stadium or group of people receiving cash. That has stopped. So, what we are doing now is that for any money to be given, we will make transfers to each of the accounts that have been captured. Secondly, we are going to digitalise the processes, and that is what we have done now. We are capturing all the digital identity of the people that are on social register.
We are also geo-tagging every home so that from the social register you can get the location of the homes, you can get who is there and you can have a view of the kind of home they live in. If I get the identity of the person and I get the geo-location of the home and I discover that the house is a five storey building, I see cars around the houses, I’ll know that home is not for a poor person. So with that we can actually have an overview of the people from our dashboard. We can have a view of homes, the kind of people that are the community, the kind of vehicle they have, the kind of social services they have in the community. You will know whether they are the poorest of the poor. That is one form of ensuring that you have some level of sincerity, and you block all the lists that are not supposed to be on the social register.
Number two, what we are doing is to ensure that we design programmes that can exit these people from just being given handouts and that is why we are doing what is called financial literacy training for all the beneficiaries.
“You will never see anybody in the ministry distributing cash to anybody in the market spaces, stadium or group of people receiving cash. That has stopped”
Every beneficiary is being trained financially so he or she knows what to do with the money and how he can exit out of this programme. So, if you are given N75, 000 as a rural farmer, you can buy fertilizer, you can buy farm inputs, you can expand your farm, you can also start a small scale business.
There are people in the villages that can work for N30, 000, N40, 000, N50, 000 businesses, selling vegetables and just doing micro businesses in the villages. These are some of the things that we are doing to improve the lifestyles of people in the rural communities.
Thirdly we are working with the IDPs who are mostly affected by the crisis that we are having. We signed a MoU with NALDA. We are creating cooperatives, they will now farm in cooperative, cultivating 10,000 hectares of land across different states that are affected by this insurgency and also flooding across the country. We want to ensure that these 10,000 hectares will support about 20,000 households.
We are providing them with fertilizers, farm inputs and at the end of the harvest; we will take 70 percent of what they will harvest and give them the cash component and 30 percent will be the food component. So, they will have both cash and food components while we take that 70 percent and support other IDPs in other communities. Simply put we are using IDPs to support IDPs.
The forthcoming programme that we are doing to support the vulnerable is the young beyond people. The government has purchased over 100,000 items in different sectors from auto mechanic to tractors, to vulcanizing to beauty, to cooking to bakery, and others. These are done to support the young people. These items are put across to target 500,000 households with that kind of project in terms of creating small scale industry and creating cooperatives of people that will exit them into these.
We are working with international donor partners to ensure that we implement all these programmes together. Then we are also working from our budget by doing a pilot skill programme of targeting, taking the young people to the private sector and marketing them at the same time. We want to ensure that the youths who are unemployed are connected directly to the market space and the private sector. We believe that if we implement most of these programmes this year will massively reduce the level of poverty.
According to the governor of CBN, with regards to fighting poverty without rising inflation, he said that there is no economic model that portends to take people out of poverty when inflation is accelerating at the level we see and for that reason they don’t intend to relent to ensure that they bring inflation under control. The conversation is that when the minimum wage was increased to N70, 000, initially we thought it was a victory but people are saying that it doesn’t make much impact. This cash intervention, are they not already canceled out by inflation?
That was not the figure before. We improved the figure. It was N50, 000 before. We increased it to N75, 000. Sometimes when we talk at the comfort of our table we feel that this money is too small for the people in the rural community. Most of the businesses that people run at the lower level, some even go as far as taking loans because we did a survey. This figure came out from the survey that was conducted not just by us but also the donor partners, the Word Bank and the rest.
This figure was arrived at by a scientific methodology of assessing the level of poverty, assessing what people can do with N75, 000 at the lower ebb, like people in agriculture, nylon businesses and other small businesses. That is what we worked on to arrive at these figures that can support homes in the rural communities.
