I recall being blown away when I came to your office with my friend, Jamil Jibril.
I carried away the impression of an articulate, competent and a principled public official who wouldn’t allow politicians or anyone to derail the social investment initiatives of the Federal Government which she oversees.
“You’re right,” I later told Jamil, who dragged me to the Villa and insisted that I should come and witness how awesome you were.
However, before leaving, I asked a question which troubled us, and which, unfortunately, it would appear, has manifested in my state of Niger: “What would happen if the beneficiaries are victimized; e.g. if their names are replaced; what are the safeguards in the system to protect the victims?”
Your colleagues answered that your office had thought of that and there was little chance of that happening. We therefore left, somewhat satisfied.
We then started to sell the social investment initiatives everywhere we went; including, posting on the social media.
This was because, we ourselves were sold after listening to your speech and after reckoning that over eight million Nigerians would take benefits from Npower, STEM bursary, monthly cash transfer to the “poorest of the poor”, loans to market women and the Home Grown School Feeding programme.
These are initiatives we could support, and we’re lucky to have someone with integrity as Maryam Uwais to captain the ship, we reasoned.
Yet, darkness is beginning to envelop your programmes; and the culprits maybe the politicians as you feared, or the coordinators, as I feared.
And we call upon you to do something. The essence of government is to protect and make people feel protected.
If you allow selfish enemies of progress to wreak havoc on these good initiatives, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to hold you responsible.
But let me start from the beginning.
Immediately after the recruitment of the Npower personnel, I started receiving calls and messages from Niger State. “We’re posted out of the local government of residence,” they complained, “and we don’t even have money to transport ourselves to the remote locations, because we’ve not received anything.”
Of course, their discontents ended with asking me to do whatever I could, including helping with transport fare. How many people could I underwrite their transport fare? I immediately left for the office of the commissioner of education in Niger State, Hajiya Fatima Madugu.
The commissioner and her permanent secretary, Alhaji Shaibu, gave me a convincing explanation for the postings.
First, even though they volunteered the information, they pointed out that the explanation I sought was the responsibility of the State Universal Basic Education Board.
Npower teachers were posted out of their local governments of residence because, some of those local governments, such as Bida, had more than enough teachers, they explained.
Chanchaga, for example, needed only about 800 of them, but got over a thousand. Should the teachers remain locally and be paid for doing nothing? Therefore, they posted them to where they were needed the most.
“But can’t the state government supplement the N30, 000 they are given, seeing that is not much?” I asked.
They explained that some of the graduates had served with National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) before and many served outside Niger - including in the Southeast and Southwest and they received less than N30, 000 a month.
However, they said that the women would be kept either in their local governments or within their senatorial districts. Well, that was a neat explanation.
But then it got worse. Qualified candidates were being replaced with those who didn’t even register for the Npower programme, many candidates who spoke with me alleged.
Some of the replaced candidates met those they were replaced with and they confessed that they had to “see” someone.
I therefore complained to the SUBEB chairman, and he told me that the responsibility of that was with the Minna office of the National Orientation Agency (NOA).
I contacted the director of NOA, who told me that the office of the governor’s special adviser on social protection, Madam Afiniki, is responsible for recruitment. He said that the only thing they do is verification. He also mentioned that there is no replacement taking place - yet.
I tried to call Madam Afiniki without success. At the time of submitting this column, she had not replied my voice message, an SMS and a WhatsApp message.
However, allegations still persist that genuine candidates are being replaced under the guise that there were some people who didn’t show. But the argument against that, by the victims is that if you need to do replacement, why don’t you do that within the pool of those already in the system of Npower?
There were people who, through glitches in the system and other reasons, didn’t even receive text messages for the online examination. Also, there are those who did examination, passed, but their names were excluded. Naturally, these were the people who should be considered first.
Although someone close to Madam Afiniki told me that 600 new candidates are being recruited outside those who are already in the Npower system, because they want to avoid conflict when the FG finally releases the remaining names in the database. Which is rather convenient. How can those who never suffered through the process take precedence and enjoy the perks before those already in the system? What happens to first come first served?
We therefore call on Mrs. Maryam Uwais to look into the matter. These initiatives alone could win the APC a reelection. However, if they are allowed to be messed up, no one can hold them up as evidence of achievement. And even if these allegations are false, public officers should talk to the people no matter how many times people ask the same question, because they are in their offices for the people and not doing them a favour. Therefore, overbearing pride or presumption of any kind from a public officer, is unacceptable.
By Ibraheem Dooba
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