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N-POWER PROGRAMMES AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The depiction of Nigeria as abundant paradox by the World Bank (WB, 2018) has continued to contradict the official statistics in the government circle. The paradox is that it cannot just be described how a resources endowed country experiencing high inflation, high unemployment and high incidence poverty can be said to be developing, even if its economic growth is in double digits. Nigeria is making little progress in eliminating poverty. The report by the global development institution shows that the human capital spending in Nigeria is among the worst in the world after overtaking India to assume the inglorious position of the “poverty capital” of the world.

Among other things, the country is enormously endowed with human, agricultural, petroleum, gas, and large untapped solid mineral resources. Particularly worrisome is that the country earned over US$300 billion from only petroleum resources during the last three decades of the twentieth century. But rather than record outstanding progress in national socio-economic development, Nigeria retrogressed to become one of the 25 poorest nations at the threshold of twenty-first century whereas she was among the wealthiest fifty (50) countries in the early-1970s.

Poverty and unemployment are siamese evils bedeviling Nigerian path to growth and development. National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report indicates how the “population of Nigerians in poverty has maintain a consistent increase from 17.7 million in 1988 to 66.7 million in 2004”. In 2010, the NBS reported that 60.9% of Nigerians were living in poverty (Obadan, 2017). “The world poverty clock in 2018 stated that Nigeria assumed the ignoble position of being the poverty capital of the world” after overtaking India, with about 86.9 million of her population in extreme poverty” (Odey & Sambe, 2019). To corroborate this assertion, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in the 2012 National Baseline Survey, documented that more than half of the Nigerian youths population in the country are unemployed (Obadan, 2017). Poverty and unemployment rate continue to climb vertically, translating into social problems of more monumental and complicated proportions, attempting to defy successive government intervention programmes geared towards ameliorating them. Every government since 1999, has had their signature poverty reduction or alleviation schemes under different appellations.

The government of President Olesegun Aremu Obasanjo (1999-2007) initiated the National Poverty Eradication Program (NAPEP) to alleviate poverty. According to Aderonmu (2017), NAPEP was established in 2010 as the primary agency of the federal government to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty in Nigeria. The core programme under the scheme involves Youth Empowerment Scheme and National Resource development and Conservation Scheme. It was revealed that despite the humongous financial outlay for the schemes, poverty and youth unemployment continued unabated.

In 2011, the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme – (SURE -P) was birthed. This scheme was designed and implemented by the then president Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan administration (2011-2015) as social intervention scheme aimed at providing employments for unemployed graduates through internship programs. The core mandate of SURE-P with regards to poverty reduction includes: the Mass transit Scheme, Vocational Training Scheme and Community Service/ Women and Youth Employment (CSWYE). This initiative has been severally criticized for lacking transparency, and was laden with monumental corruption. Asawo (2016) in a study on Subsidy Reinvestment Programme (SURE-P) and job creation in Nigeria (2012-2015) concluded that the program failed in its mandate to create employment generation in Nigeria as youth unemployment and wide scale poverty in the country still remain steadily high.

The Administration of President Muhammadu Buhari “designed and implemented the current National Social Investments Programme (N-SIP) as strategy for combating poverty and unemployment. The N-SIP scheme was created to enable citizens exit from the twin evils of poverty and unemployment through capacity building, investment and direct financial support (Abin, 2018). The programme consists of four major components include the Job Creation and Youth Empowerment (N- Power), National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP), National Cash Transfer Programme (NCTP) and Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP). NSIP generally aimed at increasing the poor and vulnerable household with income/livelihood by providing access to targeted funds, thereby improving household ability to absorb economic shock (Abin, 2018).

N-Power is a scheme under the National Social Investments Programme of the Nigerian Federal Government geared towards graduates job creation; poverty alleviation and empowerment initiatives through volunteering services. The programme is available for graduate and non-graduates. It is aimed at inculcating in Nigerian youths the learn-work entrepreneurship culture between the ages of 18-35 (FGN 2018). According to Kabeer (2018), the goals of the programme include; reducing the rate of unemployment in the country, facilitating the transfer of entrepreneurial, technical skills and employability ability and bringing solution to active public service and government diversification policy. The graduate’s category is further divided into three areas namely, the N –Teach, N–Health and N–Agro. For the non–graduates category, N–Build Scheme is geared towards equipping its beneficiaries with necessary and meaningful skills to be selfemployed. Based on the forgoing, this paper is limited to the N–Power scheme with a view to assessing its impact in ameliorating youth unemployment, mitigating the high incidence of poverty and skill acquisition respectively”.

Statement of the Problem

Poverty and unemployment remains one of the biggest social problems in Nigeria today. Available data from NBS (2010) shows that more than half of Nigerians population is currently living in squalid livelihood and has consistently remained a worrisome phenomenon demanding urgent national attention (Obadan, 2017). This is not unconnected to the fact that the poverty rate continues and had remained unabated in society, which gives room for other social vices such as armed robbery, burglary as corroborated by Olajide and Diah (2017) reports, which asserted that insecurity in Nigeria can be linked with growing poverty rate. To tackle this problem, successive Governments of Nigeria have implemented a range of measures, including NAPEP, SURE-P and currently the NSIP initiative. The NSIP initiative is envisaged to address a range of social problems such as curbing the incidence of poverty, teeming youth unemployment, entrepreneurship orientation and increasing school enrolment (Akujuru & Enyioko, 2019). The N-power initiative, which is the job creation component of the policy aims at reducing poverty and unemployment and is targeted at the Nigerian youths. However, creating a policy and its implementation to achieve set goals appear to be mutually exclusive in the Nigerian context. Efforts by successive governments to combat the excruciating poverty and monumental unemployment as well as other initiatives geared toward alleviating the precarious situation surrounding the Nigerian youths and to enhance the quality of life had ended in fiasco, as a consequence of abysmal and porous implementation of the said programmes. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of the N-power scheme in three salient areas via employment generation, economic well-being and skills enhancement.

Indeed, the N-Power programme has become a household name and has continued to generate some controversy, although the government is living up to its billing in addressing concerns raised in association with the programme. Explaining the rationale behind the programme, a highly placed government official says, the N-Power Programme of the Federal Government is a job creation and empowerment initiative of the Social Investment Programme, designed to drastically reduce youth empowerment in Nigeria (Obadan, 2017). The focus is to provide our young graduates and non-graduates with the skills, tools and livelihood to enable them advance from empowerment to empowerment, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Perhaps to further demonstrate the fact that it was aimed at addressing the challenges of empowerment, it forerunners categorized it into Graduate Teachers Corps which targeted 500,000 graduates recruitment, N-Power Knowledge targeting 25,000 non-graduates recruitment and NPower Build which targets 75,000 nongraduates’ recruitment. It was gathered that the 500,000 graduates under the N-Power Corps programme will get computing devices that will contain information necessary for their specific engagement, as well as information for their continuous training and development. Participants are to provide teaching, instructional, and advisory solutions in 4 key areas namely agriculture, health, power tech and community education (Obadan, 2017).

The N-Power Agro volunteers are meant to function as intermediaries between research and farmers. They operate as facilitators and communicators, helping farmers in their decision-making and ensuring that appropriate knowledge is implemented to obtain the best results on farms. Through the N-Power Health programme, young graduates who form part of the 500,000 N-Power Corps members are trained to work as public health assistants.They teach preventive health to community members including pregnant women, children, families and individuals. They are also trained to provide basic diagnostic services (Aderonmu, 2017).The N-Power Teach programme engages qualified graduates for the benefit of basic education delivery in Nigeria. They are deployed as teaching assistants in primary and secondary schools across Nigeria. They are not to replace the current teachers, but are to work as support teachers, assisting with teaching, school management and other functions within the schools. They assist in taking basic education to children in marginalized communities (Aderonmu, 2017).

There is also the N-Power Knowledge programme which is the Federal Government’s first step towards diversifying to a knowledge economy. This programme works alongside the planned eight innovation hubs across the country to provide incubation and acceleration of the technology and creative industries. The programme is a ‘Training to Jobs’ initiative, essentially ensuring that participants can get engaged in the marketplace in an outsourcing capacity, as freelancers, as employees and as entrepreneurs (Federal Ministry of Youth Development, 2009).Indeed, the programme is carefully designed in such a manner that if well implemented, can help in further addressing the challenges of empowerment and subsequently, reduce poverty among the youths. But then of course, there appears to be some confusion of some sort in the way and manner the programme is being handled. The programme could not kick off in most states as scheduled. Some of the controversies included the fact that the names released so far are reportedly fraught with

‘ghost names’ (Bennel, 2017).

Poverty alleviation remains a major challenge of modern economies around the world today, Nigeria is no exception. Resulting from poor enterprise culture, the poverty alleviation programme in Nigeria is now a major driver of poverty and social vices. The poverty alleviation programmes in Nigeria have assumed multi-dimensional phenomena cutting across all facets of age group, educational strata and geographies. Poverty alleviation programmes are unevenly distributed across the age groups with youth between the ages of 18-35 being the greatest beneficiaries. More disturbing today, is the ever-rising trend of youth poverty alleviation programmes in the country. The effective implementation of the programmes will discourage them from engaging in social vices which constrain in Rivers State. This study therefore seeks to examine the impact of N-Power Programme on Poverty Alleviation in Nigeria (A study of Rivers

State).

Some systemic hiccups, including insufficient information and wrong Bank Verification Number (BVN) have been identified as factors threatening to wreck the N-Power programme, introduced by the Federal Government, as a social safety net to reduce the rate of graduate unemployment plaguing the country. Specifically, the programme, which took off in December 2016 year is designed to provide a stopgap for 500,000 unemployed graduates of tertiary institutions over the next two years (Bennel, 2017).While the Federal Government is responsible for their monthly stipends, it is in partnership with state governments to verify selected unemployed graduates and deploy them to their places of primary assignment. Volunteer graduates are expected to serve in the communities where they are resident.

Under the programme, the first batch of 200,000 participants are to be paid N30, 000 a month and deployed by the respective state governments and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to their different places of assignment, including classrooms as teachers (Federal Ministry of Youth Development, 2009). But some months into the programme, it has started facing different challenges, with about 13,000 participants alleging that they have not been paid their monthly stipend (Aderonmu, 2017).For instance, the Nigeria Interbank Systems (NIBSS), which provides the technical support for the programme has identified sundry challenges, including failure on the part of the beneficiaries to input correct Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) and other details to match the information initially provided for processing. Funmi Olowosulu, a participant who was posted to LGEA Primary School, Lokoguma, Kogi State, where she teaches, is yet to receive her monthly stipend of N30, 000 three months after enrolling in the programme, because of inconsistency in her personal details, as well as her Bank Verification Number (BVN) (Bennel, 2017).

Objectives of the Study

The study is aimed at assessing the impact of the N-Power scheme on youth enterprise in Minna Metropolis, Niger State. Specifically, the study set out to:

i. examine the influence of N- Power scheme on employment generation ii. ascertain the effects of N-Power scheme on poverty alleviation iii. determine the influence of N – Power scheme on skill acquisition.

Research Questions

1. What is the influence of N- Power scheme on employment generation

2. What are the effects of N-Power scheme on poverty alleviation

3. What are the influence of N – Power scheme on skill acquisition.

Research Hypotheses

The following hypotheses have been designed to guide this study:

There is no significant relationship between the N- Power Scheme and employment generation.
There is no significant relationship between the N -Power scheme and poverty alleviation. iii. There is no significant relationship between the N – Power scheme and skill acquisition.

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