Just In: Aggrieved Npower Beneficiaries Protest In Abuja, Make Demands (Photos)

Several aggrieved beneficiaries of the Federal government empowerment programme (N-Power) are currently protesting in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.

Naija News reports that the aggrieved Npower beneficiaries over their disengagement from the programme and unsettled stipends.

The aggrieved Npower beneficiaries who carried banners with several inscriptions such as “Npower volunteers are available to close the gap of unemployment rates in education, health and agricultural sectors in the country”, also demanded that the Federal government should absorb them into the civil service.

Meanwhile, the protest is coming at a time the ministry of humanitarian affairs, disaster management and social development, has said some Npower beneficiaries were not paid their stipends because the payment platform already recognised their accounts.

The Deputy Director of Information at the Ministry, Rhoda Iliya, in a statement on Thursday, revealed that 14,020 beneficiaries of NPower have existing accounts on the payroll of other agencies. Iliya said the accountant-general of the federation is working to resolve the outstanding payment of genuine and eligible NPower beneficiaries.

“The attention of the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development has been drawn to the complaint of non-payment of some N-Power beneficiaries during the last exercise, with some, alleging non-payment for upward of four months,” she said.

She continued: “For the records, the Ministry wishes to state that it had always processed, approved and remitted necessary information for payments to the Office of the Accountant–General of the Federation (OAGF) whose responsibility it is to credit the various accounts of the beneficiaries, using the GIFMIS platform as directed by FGN.

“However, after receiving complaint of non-payment by some beneficiaries who did same through the ministry, the OAGF (GIFMIS) officially wrote informing the ministry that out of a total of Five Hundred and Sixteen Thousand, Six Hundred (516,600) N-Power beneficiaries data sent to OAGF for migration in April, 2020, only a total of Five Hundred and Two Thousand, Five Hundred and Eighty (502,580) data have successfully migrated to the GIFMIS platform, while a total of Fourteen Thousand and Twenty (14,020) beneficiaries were returned because the beneficiaries’ account details already exist in other MDAs, which is against the established rule of the N-Power programme. This is verifiable.

“The Honourable Minister, Sadiya Umar Farouq, regrets any inconvenience this might have caused genuine and eligible beneficiaries just as the OAGF saddled with the responsibility of filtering out those denied is working assiduously to remedy the situation.”