The Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige yesterday explained that the stipend of N5,000 promised by the All Progressives Congress, APC-led federal government for unemployed youths will not be a hand out to indolent people.
Declaring that no country would give free money to citizens, he stressed that the Federal Government would ensure that the youths were trained in various skills and programmes to justify the money.
Ngige, who made this known at the APC national secretariat in Abuja, revealed that the skills and programmes would also involve the state governments, adding that there will be categories of people, who would earn higher than the N5,000.
“We also have the programme on the commission cash transfer. Though even you, the press, has said it, we won’t pay N5,000 for people to be indolent. No country in the world would pay people to go home and sleep and collect cash. So, Nigeria would not be an exception.
“We will pay some people N5,000, we will pay some N10,000, and even for people in teacher conversion scheme, we will pay more than N10,000 and N15,000 as stipend while in training, and then after the training, they are going to be employed by state government and the Federal Government in different institutions.
“It is not a programme we shall run alone; the state governments are going to buy into it. They are going to synchronize with us.We are going to do it in synergy.”
Ngige who also stated that some of the programmes will cut across the ministries of Education, Agriculture and Labour, explained that: “Agriculture, because we have some agricultural universities, we will convert some people to teach the relevant agricultural science.”
He further stated that Nigeria has various skills acquisition centers and underscored the importance of training the youth.
According to him, “The ministry has specialist skills acquisition centres; we have seven like that in the ministry under the commissioner of skills or directorate for skills.
“The NDE have over 120 centres scattered all over the country. We also have those that have been built by state government and we want to capture all of these into that scheme and then get people to the scheme to be bricklayers, POP designers, builders, welders, electronics repairers and the one they called mechanic, repair of vehicles, automobile carpentry, painting and fabrication of all sorts.”
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