Minister of state, Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo (SAN) has threatened to resign his appointment if the 774.000 jobs approved by President Muhammadu Buhari under the special public works programme of National Directorate of Employment (NDE) for the unskilled rural persons is hijack by the politicians.
The pilot scheme was approved to be implemented in five local government areas in eight states of Adamawa, Borno, Ebonyi, Edo, Ekiti , Jigawa, Katsina and Kwara.
The beneficiaries are engaged in drainage digging and clearance, irrigation canals clearance, rural feeder road maintenance and maintenance of the great green wall nurseries as well as orchards.
Others are traffic control, street cleaning, cleaning of public infrastructure like health centres, schools and the likes. A total of 40.000 direct transient jobs were expected to be created in the eight pilot states.
Keyamo who was speaking at the inauguration of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Extended Special Public Works across the 774 Local Governments of the Federation , said the programme would be benefited by those targeted.
The minister said the programme was designed to mitigate lack of job opportunity in the rural area through short term engagement of one thousand (1000) unemployed persons per local government for a period of three months.
He said the programme which is a dry season transient job projects is targeting the rehabilitation/maintenance of public and social infrastructure with the participants largely drawn from the pool of unskilled rural persons.
When asked if politicians won’t hijack the process, the minister said ” this not for PDP or APC, who will want slot from my local government because I am a politician, but I assured you it will not happen.
“I will leave this job, if they want to insist that it will happen. Mr. President is targeting ordinary Nigerians who are neither PDP or APC or just anything. They just want to get jobs, they just want to feed their family.
“This is not a time for us to empower our followers as politicians. We are going to dig deep, it is one of the recommendation you are going to make, that is why you are here.”
He further tasked members of the committee to make recommendation on how best the projects can be executed.
“Recomend to us a model to adopt, we will meet Mr. President for approval. The various interest groups, Traditional Rulers, NURTW, representative of the people and so on. Those who have direct contact with the people at the grass roots.
“Let us make it clear today that, we are not going to bow down to the pressure of any politician to come and hijack this program, it will be well modeled, well executed and it will reach ordinary Nigerians.”
The special public works in rural areas is an employment intensive technique acquired and adopted by the NDE through a capacity building in collaboration with International Labour Organisation (ILO).
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