On the controversy over FG’s payment of N5000 to jobless Nigerians

Dr. Chris Ngige: We will not give N5000 for people to go and sit down at home and be sleeping; we won’t give the money to loafers and indolent persons. We are going to give to categories of people that fall under the three programmes we have packaged.

The first programme is Teach Nigeria. It is a programme we take graduates, NCE holders, education and professional graduate majors, comprising geologists, biologists, lawyers, engineers, scientists, pure and applied scientists as adhoc teachers.

In this category, Nigerians will be converted to emergency and auxiliary teachers. They will undergo training, depending on where they are domiciled. If it is near the training centre,we can give them N5000 each as transport fare.(per month o - my words)
After the training, which might be two or three months, we will now synchronise with the state government and deploy the beneficiaries not to federal schools but state schools.

It is not also true that we will only deploy them to primary schools. Some of them will go to secondary schools. We have told the NUT that they are partners in progress on this matter because we recognise teaching as a profession. We equally recognise the teachers’ registration council.

Just as we have council for medical persons, nurses, the teachers’ council will be part of the programme. They would be certified to start teaching. If, for instance, the engineers secure employment elsewhere, other persons will take up their teaching position.

We want to domicile the management of the centres under the National Directorate of Employment (NDE), a parastatal under the Ministry of Labour. The specialist capacity centres can take many graduates, the Lagos and Bauchi centres can take over 4000 trainees each in a cycle of training. It is the same for Lafia and Enugu centres that can take as high as 2000 trainees each.

We will graduate them in that cycle and based on the degree of certification received from the NDE vocational centres, the beneficiaries will migrate to the next category for specialisation in order to have Trade Test Certificate graded into certificate one, two and three.

The trade certificates are the progenitors and replacement for the former City and Guild Certificates recognised all over the world including Europe, America and Canada. Holders of that certificate can be employed in Nigeria or outside the country under a Labour Migration System. We are partnering Interna­tional Organisation for Labour Migration (IOM) system, a European Union-based organisation.

That is why we have made it clear that we are now creating pink and blue-collar jobs because there are no white-collar jobs anywhere for this administration to give Nigerians. We are facing mining, agricultural development/farming, rice, tomato cultivation, palm tree development so that we stop the importation of rice, palm oil and even tomato puree.

We are going into fish farming, bee and honey development programmes. We are concentrating on agriculture and mining as part of skill acquisition and blue collar jobs. The pink collar jobs are the service providers from those who acquire service skills. Among them are computer, GSM phones repairers, cake bak­ers, mechatronics, hairdressing and barbers. Some of them will be required to do five hours for two days and 10 hours in one week. They may do 20 hours or more in a month to qualify to collect N5000. There are others that will do more hours maybe because of their involvement in helping FRSC in traffic control or other type of community work which will involve working three times in a week. This category of persons cannot collect the same amount like others. They will get N10,000.