The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Hajiya Sadiya Farouq has thrown light on the reason for the delays beneficiaries of the Federal Government Youth Empowerment Program, N-Power are experiencing.

For sometime now, beneficiaries of the scheme have experienced delays in payment, with the most recent one, being January stipends, paid middle of February. To this, the minister said they are trying to figure out the number of people that were on the programs payroll before she took over. As it stands, they are yet to be paid February stipends.

The minister made this known on Monday during the visit of members of the House of Representatives Committee on Poverty Alleviation. Hajiya Farouq said,

“I know we had a complaint in October while we just got the NSIP into the ministry and we needed to understand the programme considering that it has been in existence before we came on board. We needed to understand before we start signing for a large amount of money and that was why we had the delay then.

“Unfortunately, then we were operating with a director who was overseeing the office of the permanent secretary and then in January, we had a new permanent secretary who also had to understand the nature of the programme.”

The Minister also added that some beneficiaries were supposed to exit the program after two years but that at the moment, there is no plan for their exit.

She said, “There is supposed to be an exit plan for N-Power graduates because the arrangement was that they will exit after two years and we have exceeded the time they were supposed to have exited.

“So, now we are looking at different options of exit for them and we are working with the ministry of finance and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to see how we can exit them and support them to go into different skills they want. The exit plan will soon be out.”