The FG is reopening its jobs portal

folarin okunola

June 6, 2017 3:21 PM

The government is looking to scale up the capacity of the FG’s National Social Investment Programme (N-SIP) to include more beneficiaries.

Zainab Ahmed

The Acting President

Speaking Abuja, the minister said the government is looking to scale up the capacity of the FG’s National Social Investment Programme (N-SIP) to include more beneficiaries.

Specifically, the capacity across the four components of the program: N-Power, National Home Grown School Feeding Programme (which I have never heard of before), Conditional Cash Transfer, and the Government Empowerment and Enterprise program, will be scaled up for 2017 (even though we are already halfway through the year).

“For example, in N-Power Scheme that 200,000 beneficiaries have been employed, we are supposed to increase it to 500,000 beneficiaries in 2017,” said Ahmed, according to a Nigeria CommunicationsWeek report.

“There is opportunity in the N-Power Programme for employment. There is opportunity in the GEEP for you to get finances to be able to start businesses. Please this is real, it is working, join the process and be a beneficiary.”

ALSO READ: This is how Osinbajo is including online payments, shopping in government

Apparently the reopening of the portal had been delayed due to the FG’s need to make the process ‘more transparent and fraud-proof’. According to reports, the minister said the project had not achieved its target because of delays in its implementation (yeah, no kidding).

“The deployment, release of funds didn’t start till October 2016 and it is so because we want to make sure that the programme is planned properly. We want to make sure that each beneficiary has bank account linked to BVN; we are targeting the right people, not just people nominated by big people,” said Ahmed.

“That took a lot of time but we thank God that the programme is going on well and it is now easier to upscale it.”

Various Nigerian governments have all started one kind of “jobs/empowerment” program or the other without any tangible result and while this may not be one of them, it definitely hasn’t had the smoothest of starts.

When the FG opened the N-Power portal, there were several complaints of outages and site failures, highlighting the government’s ineptitude at setting up a simple portal.

Despite that, there has been some N-Power testimonies and it seems like the FG is really trying to make this work (even if it is doing so in the most inefficient way imaginable). Fingers crossed but you should totally check it out. A job could be waiting. Happy hunting!

folarin okunola