With about N279 billion so far spent in empowering 500,000 Nigerian youths under the N-Power programme since December 2016, Federal Government is using the programme to change the narratives in job creation under the National Social Investment Programmes (NSIP). Afolabi Imoukhuede, senior special assistant (SSA) to the President on Job Creation and Youth Employment, Office of the Vice President, in this interview with journalists in Abuja, spoke on other strategic initiatives under the N-Power programme. ANTHONY AILEMEN was there. Excerpts:
In the face of growing unemployment, what have you been doing in the last four years, as presidential aide on job creation?
We have realised that we have had a bit of shaky foundation in education producing our graduates. So, we asked what can we then do because even if we reform education as we have begun to do; they can’t go back to school to start all over. They have finished and need to get into the labour market; we need to attune them to the challenges of the labour market. So, as we constantly engage with different sectors in the labour market, one thing always stands out, employability. People are not ready for the jobs that are available. So, under the social investigation programme, it was important we have one component that would speak to job creation and ensure that it is focused towards the youths, and that is the N-Power. We then decided that we will use N-Power to address Nigeria’s employability challenges. Our focus therefore is that you must be within the bracket of at least secondary school, post secondary school and above, because those are the ones either going to labour market or are already in the labour market. So, the next step was to speak to the sectors and understand the challenges they are having with our people and create what is almost like a remedial, let us use this N-Power to correct the gaps that they say our people have. So that after that remedial time, it will further enable our people to be employable.
Secondly, we also needed to change the narratives of jobs for our youths. The era of you finishing school and waiting for white collar job is over. We are in the era of how can I even create jobs, so entrepreneurship becomes very critical. So we said, how can we use this N-Power platform to build entrepreneurship skills amongst our people such that the skills will be well measured to the sectors that require a lot of enterprising youths.
Lastly, remember we also designed what is called the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) which took certain sectors like agriculture and agriculture business as priority. The other sectors including construction, be it roads, rails, housing and others; technology, entertainment, and the creative sectors. We looked at basically none oil and gas sectors really. So, putting all of those together, what we then did was to come up with different segments that helped to address the needs of youths and at the same time meeting the needs of the market.
The N-power graduate programme, as we speak has 500,000 youths engaged across the 774 local government areas in Nigeria. There is no single local government area that you will not find N-Power there. Let’s also remember that but for the dedicated commitment of Mr. President, we won’t even have the N-Pawer programme. We started this programme in the heat of recession in December 2016, when we actually recruited the first badge. Now, we are not just dishing out money because each of them get N30,000 monthly stipend and none of them is being owed, as we speak. The most interesting part is that we work collaboratively with all the 36 states of the federation including the FCT irrespective of party affiliation, the programme is for all Nigerians. When we did the batch 1, the highest number went to Rivers State. The last time I checked, Rivers State is a non-APC state but it didn’t matter the party colouration, we worked that way and we deployed.
Another thing is that technology has been the main backbone of this programme and we have worked with technology partners. Our technology partners are Nigerian companies made up of Nigerian youths and every technology we have deployed has been home grown. We have not had cause to bring in Indians or any other nationality to work with us on this programme.
From the inception of the programme, how much has been invested?
It is every simple talking about amount that has been invested. I am saying that in Batch 1, they started earning from December 2016, so roughly we invested N72 billion just for Batch 1 alone. That is aside from the gadgets that they get and aside from all the sponsored trainings that they get. For instance, all the trainings on agric for N-Agro, training for health for those who are in health, we sponsor all of that through the federal agencies, ministry of agriculture and ministry of health. So direct investment in our people is N30,000 x 200,000 = N6 billion every month for the first batch which started in 2016. So they have been there for over two years, that is N72 billion multiply by two years or thereabout. But since August last year, the wage bill moved from N6 billion to N15 billion because it’s now 500,000 of them that earn N30,000 monthly. We have been on N15 billion for almost one year because by end of July it will be one year that we have been making that investment every month. So if you put it together, that tells you how much investment we have made and like I have said, we don’t owe anyone because the money is paid directly to them not through a proxy. The Batch 2 we are just finalizing with the Bank of Industry to procure their gadgets and get it out to them.
Recently, the Chairman of Nigeria Governors’ Forum, Kayode Fayemi, announced a proposal to recruit N-Power beneficiaries for community policing. Are you involved in this? Was this your idea?
Yes. I defined the N-Power as standing on three tripods – Learn, so it is continuous learning hence they even learn through the gadgets that we have given them. Work, like I said they all work, and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship means at some point you must exit the programme. This is one programme where we celebrate resignations, like Daniel from Taraba who got a job in CBN or Mohammed, an IDP from Borno, who used N-Power to settle himself and today he works with NTA in Yola. So when they resign like that we celebrate because you must exit at some point. This is a lifeline that Mr. President has given you to impact your life.
So that is what the Chairman of Nigeria Governors Forum was talking about. We know the security challenges and we have and we also know the challenges and limitations of the Nigeria Police Force, we know that they wanted to recruit another 10,000 but the governors felt as Chief Security Officers (CSOs) of their states, 10,000 in the whole of Nigeria is small and how many are you going to give every state. So they thought, we have N-Power volunteers that are community based, the beauty of this programme is that it is so transformational because they impact their communities where they reside unlike the NYSC where you are yanked from your base and taken somewhere else. Also remember in N-Power, beneficiaries must be post-NYSC graduates except you are in the non-graduate programme which I will speak about or you are in NCE programme which obviously you are not deployed for NYSC.
So that is the beauty that the governors saw and realize that these are foot soldiers and no state has less than 10,000 N-Power beneficiaries now. So 10 multiply by 37 equal 370,000 and that tells you that some states have more than 10,000 beneficiaries. States like Osun has 17,000, FCT 14,000 and when you divide that into local councils, it tells you how many foot soldiers they have. So the governors realise, this is the community policing we have been talking about, this is an opportunity to engage our N-Power volunteers. This is something we have marketed to the governors, the ministries, departments and agencies.
So, for the people have been investing in, it should be their rights of first refusal. So if police or immigration wants to recruit, why not first offer the opportunity to those who qualify within this programme, so that as they are going out more people will come in. That is the promise Mr. President and his vice made during the campaign, that we are not even going to reduce N-Power, we are going to expand it. That explains why you have been hearing about the figure of one million. That means if we can move some of these people into other opportunities, we will have space to bring in more Nigerian youths into the programme. You will get the re-skilling, re-tooling, as well as so you too can go out and merge into opportunities. So yes, we are working with the NGF because we supply the data to them and Nigeria Police.
What is the outcome of the N-Built training you had with the heads of centers to help review the outcome of your programme?
In taking care of the youths we needed to be careful so it won’t look like an elitist programme so it won’t look like we are taking care of only graduates. So that was why we designed the non-graduates programme. But I can tell you that 50 percent of the beneficiaries of non-graduate programme are already graduates, who are not looking for white collar job but want to learn a trade. Recall I said we created the non-graduate programme based on sectors, the N-Built deals with vocational skills for construction industry and automobile industry and more recently we added hospitality industry. We also have the N-Tech which deals with training of our young people on software development, we have 4,000 of them. We are just about to role that out but we have rolled out already the first series of the hardware which we call N-Tech Hardware where we will train 6,000 young Nigerians, 1,000 per geo-political zone how to repair this smart phones, laptops and all that. The reason for that is that…remember I said we have our 200,000 devices, that is 200,000 devices in the market that are at community level. So if something happens, it freezes and all that you will have to come to the city, so we needed to train new set of young people that can really be repairing these things at community level.
Another component is N-Creative, here they learn animation, graphics, script writing, videography and all of that. We just launched the one for the 17 southern states in Benin recently and the one for northern states will take off in another two months in Abuja.
The last one is Social Investment Innovations Hubs, where we have one hub per geo-political zone but north central zone will be here in Abuja, North East is Yola, North West – Kaduna, South East – Enugu, South South- Benin, South West – Akure.
So, what we did with the skills in the N-Built, was to work with the Technical Colleges as training centers and other centers that are training on these technical skills after we did assessment and they passed. To pass it means you must have the equipment, the instructors and the structures because we recruit and send trainees to them. As at last year we had 250 centres but by early this year, we now have 401 centres that are participating in the N-Built programme. So far we have trained 20,000 in Batch 1 and another 20,000 already in Batch 2 began their trainings in March just before the elections and will train for another one year. Out of this number, construction has 28,000, automobiles getting close to 10,000 and hospitality getting about 2,600 trainees. We work with organizations like the council of registered builders of Nigeria, they regulate all that happens in construction industry, we work with national automotive design development council and with the hospitality council.
For those exiting the programme, how do they have access to startup funds?
That is one of the broad areas we are looking at as exit options. We have brought our GEEP counterpart to the table, who are already designing what could be the startup capital for each N-Power programme. The beauty of N-Power beneficiaries is that no matter what segment they were in, they learnt the business of cooperatives very well, understanding that my own N10,000 savings cannot do much but if 10 of us come together that is N200,000. So what we are looking at is with the startup kits we are looking to give them, cluster them as well so they can set up a garri processing cottage industry for instance. So if our startup is at N90,000, they already have what it takes to start up the cottage industry and own it.
We also have NESA which is ready to work with us in the 15 economic agric value chains that we have and we have spoken to CBN which is ready de-risk because they know they have market for the produce. We are also speaking to state governors to give land through anchor-borrowers programme to these youths in agriculture. We are also working with BoI to give small loans.
So we are also looking at taking up opportunities like community policing, if any company wants to hire a number of people, we link them through job matching. That is why each time Mr. President engaged, he tells them, nobody is going to throw you back to the streets. The assurance to N-Power volunteers is that nobody is throwing any of them back to the streets because throwing them back to the streets negates the purpose of why we started it. So we ensure that you exit into something, it may not be Hilton comfort but some kind of comfort that enables us to bring in more people and recycle them as well and give them opportunity life line.
