“About 70 to 75 per cent of the rural population in Northwest are financially excluded completely. You will have to go and check, these people we are talking about are important people in the society. They do not even have a bank account, so who are you transferring the money to?”
The Kaduna state governor, Uba Sani has described the President Bola Tinubu’s suspended N8,000 monthly palliative to indigent households is “a scam.”
Recall that following the removal of fuel subsidy, Tinubu proposed a six-month-N8,000 monthly palliative to 12 million Nigerian households expectedly to cushion the effect of the subsidy removal.
Cross-country reactions, which did not welcome the proposal had forced the President to order a review of the scheme.
Joining those against the proposal, Sani, in an interview with ARISE TV, said the President should have brought up the issue of cash transfer at this time, especially because there “no accurate and updated database of the Nigerian people that will benefit from the scheme.”
“My position has always been that, at this critical time, cash transfer should not be something that we should bring up. I think that cash transfer for me, in my opinion, is a scam. Completely it’s a scam. I can be very certain about that, because who are you transferring the money to?
“Let me give an example, go and check the current statistics. Like I said, as the Chairman, Committee of Banking for four years in Nigeria, I oversighted Central Bank; I oversighted all the commercial sectors of our economy for the last four years and I looked at the statistics, I will be very firm on this issue and you can go and check it.
“About 70 to 75 per cent of the rural population in Northwest are financially excluded completely. You will have to go and check, these people we are talking about are important people in the society. They do not even have a bank account, so who are you transferring the money to?” the governor said.
According to him, the social register has not been updated, adding that in the Northwest region, about 70% of the rural population was not captured in 2019 due to insecurity.
“In my opinion, what we said was that the social register should be updated. If you are aware, some of the names were put together as far back as 2019. And of course, nothing is constant.
“For example, some local governments in my state are not captured largely because of the insecurity in the state, and believe me, truly, the social register lacks credibility,” he stressed.
Sani noted that the government should ensure that the financially excluded individuals, especially in the Northwest are brought into the financial system before implementing the cash transfer programme.
