A National Ambassador of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises and former beneficiary of the NPower programme, Orioye Benedict Gbayisemore, on Sunday, hailed the timely intervention of President Bola Ahmed, on the crisis rocking the National Social Investment Programme, (NSIP) describing it as noble.
Gbayisemore who appealed to President Tinubu to be very decisive and deliberate about eradicating poverty in Nigeria, but called for transparency in the programme designed to make Nigerian youths self-reliant and employers of labour.
He said, “It is an issue of concern to us who has benefited from this programme and seen all of this financial misappropriation.
“This programme was designed to create employment for the teaming youth of this country and to awaken their entrepreneurial skills. For me, as a case study this programme brought me to limelight and today I am an employer of Labour’
Amb. Orioye Benedict urged the committee to do a thorough job and contact the major stakeholders of the project for comprehensive report and fine-tuning of the programme”.
He noted that the programme is the largest social investment programme in the whole of Africa which has affected every household in the country both the poor and the rich.
He tasked the committee to ensure that all those found culpable to be brought to justice to serve as a deterrent to others.
“I am appealing to the committee to expose those behind the fraudulent act and ensure that is not allowed to go scot-free”, he added.
President Tinubu had last week constituted a special presidential panel on social investment programmes
The task before the committee among others is to Special Presidential Panel is to immediately undertake a comprehensive review and audit of existing financial frameworks and policy guidelines of the social investment programmes with a view to implementing a total re-engineering of the financial architecture of the programmes with detailed modification to procedures guiding the programmes’ implementation moving forward.