Senator Udoma Udo Udoma, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, says the Federal Government’s Social Intervention Programmes will start fully in 2017.
Udoma Udo Udoma
Udoma made this known while fielding questions from some stakeholders on the status of programmes at the Public Presentation of the 2017 Budget Proposals in Abuja on Monday.
He said that N500 billion had been allocated for the programme, which included Home Grown School Feeding Programme, Government Economic Empowerment Programme, Nigeria-Power Job Creation Programme, Conditional Cash Transfers and Social Housing Fund.
N500 billion was allocated for same programmes in the 2016 budget.
Udoma said that 2106 was a year of planning and consultation for the programmes
Udoma said: “We have to get these programmes right so excessive consultation and excessive planning has gone into those projects because we don’t want any waste.
“We want to make sure that the funds get to the beneficiaries; you will see full implementation in 2017; that is why the same allocation has been made for the programmes.
“We will not waste time in terms of preparatory work, it has been done already.”
Speaking on the level of implementation of the programmes, Zainab Ahmed, the Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, said a lot of processes had gone into the implementation.
Ahmed said that the implementation did not start until September/October this year.
Ahmed said: “In October that the programme picked up; 200,000 youths have been employed and deployed to states to work.
“The home school feeding programme has also taken off in Anambra, Kaduna and Osun and eight other states are ready to join.
“There are a lot of processes that we have to go through to prepare the release of funds for this project.
“We didn’t want a situation where the programme will be like other social protection programmes in the past that the funds were misused.”
The minister said that a lot of effort was done to identify beneficiaries, to enumerate them, to prepare the personnel that would be working and tracking the progress of the programme.
NAN reports that Federal Government had earmarked N185 billion in the 2017 budget for new initiatives.
The initiatives include the Social Housing Programme, Special Economic Zone
Projects, Export-Expansion Grant and Recapitalisation of the Bank of Industry.
