Afolabi Imokhuede is the Senior Special Assistant to the Vice President on the N-Power initiative in the Vice President’s office. In this interview with AMBROSE NNAJI, he spoke on the activities and achievement of the programme so far and its prospects. Excerpt:
Please give an overview of the activities of the Npower programme?
Our cumulative release, over the last two years, is just about N250 billion. So, say with 25 per cent of what has been the appropriation released to us, we have done a whole lot with more.
In N-power, 500,000 graduates are now under the payroll of the Federal Government social investment programme. In the N-power programme, graduates are deployed to every 774 local governments. Of the figure, 200,000 have been engaged since December 2016, although we promised 500,000 in the first one year. Perhaps we could have done better but for the recession. We opened the portal on June 12, 2016 precisely and closed it August 31, 2016, at a time we got a total of 750,000 cleaned applications. We got over a million initially, but after scrutiny, it came to 750,000; from this figure, 350.000 was from graduate applications and 300,000 was from non-graduate applications.
It means therefore that even from the applications we were short of our target, hence we had a batch one, 200, 000 that were deployed at a time, and so in putting numbers to it, since December 2016 down to July 2017 our payroll annually in N-power is N6 billion every month and the money is paid directly to our beneficiaries not to any third party.
Our own direct response is in the area of skills. I think every one of us agrees that you can’t find a good Tyler, a good carpenter and all of that, yet in this same country we had them well so we just reverted back. So in the N-built cadre of N-power, we work with a construction firm set up to train skilled and competent artisans, the first set are 20,000 of them both in the construction and automobile sector; they get a tool kit that is worth an average of N250,000 each after their three months internship as a graduate. In the non-graduate N-tech, graduates all have devices, they have a competing devices, they have got a phone, a tablet, again local content was put into that, and that in collaboration with the Bank of Industry (BoI) we allowed all local players to play, those that passed the various criteria are placed by National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the technology agency of government; we have eight vendors, six local and two foreign and the only two foreign were Samsung and Tecno, the others are local, Zinox and others.
Is there any kind of follow up on the trainees?
Yes. The way we designed our programme is that we have strategic partners in the sectors. In construction for example, the Council of Registered Builders of Nigeria (CORBON) is like their adopted father; CORBON work with their counterpart in the Nigeria Institute of Builders (NIB) and this cascades down to all the states.
What happens is that, that is where we get our monitoring for they are the ones that adopt them down to the state level in fact at the end of the apprenticeship the certification you will be getting is a CORBON certification, it is a common certification, the same thing in the automobile, the Nigeria Automotive Design and Development (NADD) is the adopter working down the line with them, and organisations such as Coscharis. We are doing same with technology, the computer association group. That is the mechanism we have for monitoring, they are the ones that even help them to get attached, once you are on internship there is a monthly log book that they pick signed and returned.
You said the current wage bill is N15billion from August. What is the total figure and number of participants?
Well, we can do a simple mathematics N15billion multiple that from July 2016 to August 2017, multiple that by 500,000 participants that is why it is N15billion. The N-power graduates are 30, 000 multiple by 500,000 across the country gives you N15billion.
There is an investment of N250,000 in their tool kits, we buy their tool kits and hand it over to them , because we have to buy relevant tool kits, the carpenters tool kits, welder’s, the Tyler’s, Mason’s toolkits are different from each other. So what I am saying is that each of them in that field are in the construction companies platform, welder, carpentry, masonry, electrical, plumbing, painting and decoration, these are the six of them in the construction industry.
The seventh one is the automobile technician. We have 20, 000 of them in the field live and direct across Nigeria under those categories, another 20,000 will join in the next few weeks while were implementing the 2018 budget.
We do not need to count that at the moment, in addition to that we have 6,000 technology hardware technicians I was just saying that because we gave devices to the graduates it means that beneficiaries in batch one have 200,000 devices in their hands 300,000 are just about get their own devices we also knew that we needed to build capacity of people who are able to repair devices just like, basically just say expand your GSM villages, expand skilled people that can play in the GSM villages, so we decided to train 6,000across the country 1,000 per geo-political zone.
So what we have is that Minna is the geo-political zone for Northcentral, Kano was the host for Northwest, Owerri is the host for Southeast and Yola is the zone for Northeast, Benin is the host for the Southsouth and Ibadan is the host for Southwest, so all but Ibadan have started and graduated their trainees in December, so only Ibadan will be starting end of January and Benin started late and they will be graduating their trainees around February that is another 6,000 and again they get a repair tool kit that is about the same cost of N250,000 as well and then they get a stipend of N10,000 every month during the programme, three months internship training and nine months apprenticeship.
