The Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo on Wednesday gave insights into how the beneficiaries of the direct cash transfer from the $322m recovered Abacha loot would be shared to beneficiaries nationwide.
Osinbajo gave the hint at the launching of the Monitoring of Recovered Assets through Transparency and Accountability project as part of the ‘Roundtable of the African Union Champion on Anti-Corruption’ to commemorate 1st African Day of Anti-Corruption.
The forum, which was co-organised by the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption and the African Union, has as its theme ‘Enhancing Domestic Resources for Sustainable Development Goals by Improved Asset Recovery and Asset Return’.
The Vice President, who was represented by the Special Adviser to the President on Social Protection, Mrs. Maryam Uwais, assured that the cash transfer programme would be monitored to ensure transparency of the process.
According to him, monitoring teams would visit the individual households that have been identified through “deliberate targeting” and the beneficiaries would be determined from a register now being developed.
Osinbajo clarified: “By the end of this year, we should have a register of the entire country. This register is where all our beneficiaries will be mined from. There is a number for each of the beneficiaries, and we’ll have pictures captured.
“When we started, three banks offered to support us with the biometrics. By the time they started going to the locations they realised it was costly for them. So they backed. Now, we’re working through agents to ensure we pay at the last mile, because if a person is on this register, and is actually deserving of this our N5,000, many of them cannot travel for long distances.
“Many of them need the money so we don’t want them spending money going to look for their money. So we’re using the agents. We’re working to see that their biometrics are captured.
“It’s more than just financial inclusion. It’s also social inclusion. It’s important for planning that every state is aware of where these people are located. We’re also collating data on access roads to these communities, nearest primary schools, secondary schools, healthcare centres, connectivity issues.
“There is a huge conversation on how to ensure that we’re able to make payment by virtual wallet, because a lot of our women on pay days are visible when they go to collect their money and we need to protect them”, the Vice President clarified.
It would be recalled that some opposition groups, including the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), have over the past week that the idea of sharing the fund to the under-privileged was unveiled by the present administration been stringently opposing the move.
Some of the critics hinged their position on the fact that there were no error-free criteria by which the poor, the target beneficiaries, could be identified in the society.
