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By Chukwudi Nweje
The United Action Front of Civil Society has blasted the President Bola Tinubu-led government over the N8,000 monthly palliative approved for 12 million poor Nigerian families.
It noted that 12 million people is a “mere fraction of the poverty-stifled masses” and added that there is no guarantee that the funds would get to the target audience.
A statement Sunday, signed by Olawale Okunniyi, the Head, National Coordinating Centre for the group, noted the N8,000 palliative could be another deceitful programme like the trader moni scheme, the direct cash transfer and the school feeding programme supervised by the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management during the immediate past administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari.
The statement read in part, “The leadership of the organised platform of the Nigerian civil society unequivocally decries as another grand deceit; the N8,000 monthly handouts proposed by the government for the yet-to-be-disclosed (or otherwise covertly selected) 12 million poor and vulnerable households.
“The United Action Front of Civil Society laments the reality of making poor citizens of Nigeria take the bitter pill of repaying a wrongheaded loan supposedly being acquired in their interest in the nearest future.”
The statement added that the N8,000, even if it got to the intended target group would not make any impact on their lives because of the price hike caused by the subsidy removal.
The statement further said, “It is beyond doubt that the meagre monetary palliative could barely feed a family of two for five days because the fuel price hike in the name of subsidy removal has deepened the proportion of multi-dimensional poverty in the country.
“We consider the intervention as erroneous and a poorly conceived ploy to hoodwink the masses.
“There are enough reasons to conclude that the N8,000 monthly handout to a mere fraction of the poverty-stifled masses would end up another avenue for the corrupt enrichment of a few cliques in power, as witnessed with previous supposed poverty alleviation programmes of the APC, namely the trader moni scheme, the direct cash transfer and the school feeding programme supervised by the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management.
“It is unfortunate that the government could be contemplating a meagre N8,000 six-monthly handout per tiny fraction of the several millions of households across the country at a time that a whooping N70 billion has been voted for 469 members of the National Assembly. We make bold to assert that the N8,000 monthly handout is therefore not only insufficient but ludicrous and therefore cannot and won’t be the remedy for the deep hardship attributable to the government’s reckless economic policy.
“It speaks to a lack of compassion and utter display of insensitivity and arrogance on the part of the leadership of the new administration to have concluded that the N8,000 monthly per household could sufficiently ameliorate the profound hardship aggravated by the hike in fuel price across urban and rural communities in Nigeria.
“It is also a matter of serious concern that the new administration is evidently unmindful of the overriding implication of the worsening debt burden under which the Nigerian economy continues to asphyxiate.
“The chocking debt profile has further been worsened by the $800 million World Bank loan which is bound to widen the 2023 budget deficit.”
