N500bn social welfare schemes

The Federal Government has earmarked N500 billion in the 2016 budget for social welfare intervention programs. The proposed intervention is part of Medium Term Expenditure Framework for 2016, 2017 and 2018 and Fiscal Strategy Paper forwarded to the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari last week. The Assembly has already approved the two papers. The […]

The Federal Government has earmarked N500 billion in the 2016 budget for social welfare intervention programs. The proposed intervention is part of Medium Term Expenditure Framework for 2016, 2017 and 2018 and Fiscal Strategy Paper forwarded to the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari last week. The Assembly has already approved the two papers. The intervention programs will cover the areas of school feeding, conditional cash transfer to vulnerable persons and a post-NYSC grant.
The President said in the paper that “N500 billion has been provided in the 2016 budget as social investment for those programs. The interventions will start as a pilot scheme and work towards securing the support of donor agencies and our development partners in order to minimise potential risks.” The President and the ruling APC deserve commendation for trying to make real one of their major campaign promises. This is an improvement over the past, when major campaign promises never saw the light of day after politicians hoodwinked voters to deliver their votes. The Buhari regime is eager to make up for lost time but Care must be taken in the choice and planning of these complicated social programs.
It is important that government presents to Nigerians a detailed plan on how these welfare programs will be operated, where the funding will come from in view of dwindling government revenues, as well as the agencies and persons that will manage these programs. It is also important to know how long the programs will last and when the pilot scheme will be expanded to cover the whole nation.
While the three target areas identified by the government are all social areas crying for intervention, all three also promise to be controversial and could be bogged down in problems of implementation unless they are very carefully planned and executed. For example, the school feeding program could increase school enrolment and retention. It is however doubtful if this is the biggest challenge confronting schools in the country. Problems such as poor quality teachers, low morale of teachers occasioned by poor and epileptic pay, dearth of furniture and teaching aids in schools etc are more serious challenges in the sector. Even if school feeding leads to high retention of pupils, what is the end result if teachers are poorly paid or not paid at all for months?
We should remember that previous administrations in Nigeria have tried school feeding programs. President Obasanjo launched such a program on pilot basis in 2005 but it soon fizzled out. Minister of Agriculture Chief Audu Ogbe said last week that 30 million Nigerian schoolchildren will get a litre of milk each daily as part of the school feeding program. We hope this huge quantity of milk will not be imported. It is important for government to dust up reports of past efforts at school feeding across the country to see why they failed and what can be done differently. School feeding programs dating back to early post-colonial times often proved to be conduit pipes where contractors and senior civil servants connived to siphon monies from the public till.
The conditional cash transfer to vulnerable persons and post NYSC grant also deserve to be spelt out for us to see. We need to know who qualifies as a vulnerable person. Is it the aged, disabled, retired, internally displaced or the young? How much will be transferred to each recipient, for how long and with what conditionalities? An open-ended cash transfer could turn out to be socially injurious if it creates a dependency syndrome. Previous regimes have tried programs such as National Poverty Alleviation Program [NAPEP] which failed to achieve the purpose and was abused by both operators and beneficiaries.
Since the announcement of the N500 billion social welfare intervention funds for next year, contractors and shady interest groups have been dusting up their files and articulating their strategies on how to hijack these programs as they so often did in the past. Social welfare programs in Nigeria are highly susceptible to corruption and the Buhari administration, whose key governance program is fight against corruption, must take every possible step to ensure that civil servants and contractors do not hijack these programs and bog them down in corruption.