• Fri. Feb 21st, 2025

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“Political Entities Attempting to Influence the Cash Transfer Register”- Minister Of Humanitarian

Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Nentawe Yilwatda has said the recently launched Cash Transfer programme for the most vulnerable in Nigeria might be facing challenges of political manipulation.

This is because, certain politicians are currently trying to influence the recently launched Cash Transfer Register, according to him.

Nentawe Yilwatda said that while there are 19.8 million Nigerians registered in the social program, the government has confirmed the identities of only 1.2 million individuals.

The Minister expressed concern that certain politicians are attempting to sway low-income individuals who are included in the social register, aiming to benefit from the government’s conditional cash transfer program.

“Some people want us to bend and allow the governors or the states to just generate the list and send. It’s a conditional transfer; conditions are attached to qualifying to benefit from the social safety net.

“So, we will not bend to allowing any political affiliation or attachment to this conditional cash transfer. Poverty doesn’t know political party, poverty doesn’t know tribe, poverty doesn’t even understand the grammar we are blowing. A poor person is a poor person.

“It is going to be clearly digital. This time around, we are carrying the CSOs along so that all payments, we will ask them to verify, they can do follow-ups and we can have some levels of transparency in what we are doing.

“Currently, we have a social register; we have 19.8 people on the social register but when you have a list, you need to validate that list.

“For now, the people that have been validated are only about 1.2 million people. We need to validate the entire register so that we can get the actual people who are supposed to benefit from it, authenticate their locations; their houses, where they are, and capture on GPS location — the location of their homes.

“So that we are sure they exist and be sure that these people are as poor as they claim because there are social indices for judging poverty like access to water, access to health, access to education, and access to economic facilities. So that you can now pick the poorest of the poor in the society,” he said.

By News Editor

Our News Editor, Muyiwa is an information management expert and Development Blogger with more than a decade experience in investigative reporting and journalism. He is passionate about human angle stories to all social issues in Nigeria and Africa.