Given his modest salary and the heavy responsibility of supporting his family of four, 38-year-old Joseph Musa, an Abuja mason, has not had a very happy life.
He claims that since the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu-administration took office, it has been much harder for people to survive, in part because of the many economic policies and changes that have been implemented without enough safeguards to less fortunate people.
But Musa is not the only one. Millions of underprivileged Nigerians, from Lagos to Benin, Jos, Makurdi, Kafanchan, Yobe, Uyo, and Port Harcourt, are groaning under the weight of the rippling and severe impacts of President Tinubu’s knee-jerk actions while the government mulls its alternatives.
A recent evaluation of a palliative project authorised by President Tinubu was supposed to provide N8,000 to 12 million families over the course of six months using the social register.
Using the social register, the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs has been making cash transfers to the impoverished in recent years, particularly throughout the majority of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.
Who then are the poor that have benefited from government involvement, given that many less fortunate Nigerians have persistently disputed the veracity of the register and said that they have not yet received a cash transfer?
The Federal Government had made preparations to get a further loan from the World Bank in the amount of $800 million (or roughly N621,200,000,000), with the purpose of distributing it via the social register as one of the palliative measures intended to lessen the impact of the loss of subsidies.
President Tinubu’s spokesperson, Dele Alake, explained why borrowing the funds was necessary: “The facility’s goal is to increase coverage of shock response safety among the underprivileged and vulnerable Nigerians. For a period of six months, N8,000 per month would be provided to 12 million low-income families. Along with the free grains, fertilisers, and other agricultural input, this is also available.
However, the National Economic Council has rejected the Social Register as a legitimate route for distributing such, given the debate surrounding who the poor are who have benefitted from prior interventions in the forms of cash transfers and COVID-19 palliative.
The Council unanimously decided last week not to implement the Tinubu administration’s conditional cash transfer using the national social register established by the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration, which may now assuage the cries of the less fortunate who have been questioning the authenticity of the register.
The Council emphasised that the register had integrity problems since the standards for its compilation were unclear as it left its monthly meeting at the State House in Abuja on Thursday.
According to Anambra State Governor Charles Soludo, who briefed reporters following the meeting presided over by Vice President Kashim Shettima, it is not feasible to digitally transfer money to the lowest of the poor, the majority of whom are unbankable, despite what the previous government had hoped.
In the presence of his colleagues from the states of Ogun and Bauchi, Bala Mohammed and Dapo Abiodun, respectively, Soludo remarked that it was impossible to identify the claimed recipients of the financial transfers in the communities.
“We need to address the issue that we don’t have a credible register,” he stated.
He claims that the NEC decided that the states should create their own registers using both official and informal methods to ensure that all beneficiaries at the subnational level could be readily accessible in that manner.
Government interventions in the past have been carried out through the National Social Safety Nets Project (NASSP), which is run by the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and Social Development, which is based in the White House.
There have long been concerns about how the government determines the real number of poor and vulnerable Nigerians, as well as the standards used to identify this population.
Joseph Abuku, the NASSCO’s communication manager, clarified some of the major criteria for identifying the poor and vulnerable in Nigeria who need government assistance. He said: “The process of collecting people and families for the National Social Register began in 2016. Community involvement drives the process, which is managed at the state level by the State Operations Coordinating Unit (SOCU) and overseen by the State Ministries of Budget and Planning.
“Community-Based Targeting (CBT), a strategy where people of a community are separated into categories of women, men, youth, and in certain instances persons with disabilities, is the targeting procedure utilised to identify impoverished individuals and homes. They are then asked to describe poverty in the context of their community before going on to name any vulnerable or disadvantaged persons of the community.
Each of the three groups would come up with a list of those who were impacted and add to it. A copy of the list is given to the community, a second copy is kept by the Local Government Community Development Desk Office, and a third copy is kept by the state at SOCU. The list is made in three copies and signed off by a male and female community member nominated to be the grievance redress volunteer.
He said, “SOCU uses the list to send out enumerators throughout the neighbourhood to gather data on each of the families mentioned.
“In order to accomplish these goals, information from the following five areas is gathered: locational information, demographic data, socioeconomic specifics, assets possessed by the household, and home features of each family. The 138 data variables throughout the five categories of information, including information on household members, must be filled out for each household.
8000 federal wards, 764 local government areas, and more than 150,000 communities in all 36 states and the FCT have participated in the process, he said.
The federal government merely compiles a copy of each State Social Register into the national database to create the National Social Register (NSR). Each state government owns the registers.
The National Social Register (NSR) is a compilation of all State Social Registers (SSR). Before being approved into the database, the SSR must pass many checks and validation procedures.
According to Abuku, “NASSCO provides the oversight for the data quality and assurance, by deploying MIS, (Managing Information System), and systems check processes, including third party monitors engaged from Civil Society for the purpose of monitoring registration and payments processes, as well as grievance redress mechanism deployed to address complaints and concerns around inclusion and exclusion issues.”
The National Social Register, which the NSSP materials describe as a cooperation between the federal government and the World Bank, aims to create a database of underprivileged Nigerians that may be used for social interventions, research, and other purposes.
In collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), a study of the nation’s living standards was conducted. In order to do this, MoUs were also inked with the state governments.
Nigeria has been able to create one of the biggest social registers in the world, according to Mr. Iorwa Apera, National Coordinator of the NASSCO, who previously spoke with The Guardian.
138 points of social indicators are connected to each and every person in the database, and the register continues to be the nation’s most complete database of people, including extensive information on nearly 50 million impoverished and vulnerable residents.
The National Social Safety Nets Coordinating Office (NASSCO) was established as part of this program’s first major component, which was to strengthen and establish the foundation for social protection implementation in Nigeria. The second major component was the targeted cash transfer to the poor and vulnerable, and the National Cash Transfer Office (NCTO) was established as part of this programme to oversee the cash transfer exercise.
No social register in the world, according to Apera, “is comparable with the number that we have in Nigeria,” he said, insisting that the National Social Register is the most important one at the moment. Second, it has the largest database of people in our nation. It has the data of more than 50 million people.
Each of those people has about 138 indicators attached to them, including their biographical information, occupation, educational background, access to community social amenities, access to local roads, access to drinking water, access to restrooms, place of residence, and disability status, including whether or not they are disabled and what kind of disability they have. This is how comprehensive it is.
However, prominent sociologist Lai Olurode said in response to what he dubbed the “nation’s data debacle and palliative to vulnerable,” that “certainly, the Presidency is bothered by the full ramifications of the removal of fuel subsidy from petroleum products.” Second, it is aware that the most vulnerable people in Nigeria cannot endure a full-fledged free-for-all market environment.
The milk of human compassion is directed towards the underprivileged, the elderly, vulnerable groups, and farmers—even in the heartland of unrestrained capitalism and conservatism, where Adam Smith’s invisible hand is predicted to operate unchecked.
“Despite the fact that the Federal administration’s desire for social contact, Nigeria’s administration faces data difficulties. This contributes to the failure of all past administrations’ initiatives. Any financial or in-kind assistance handed out would be wasted without a reliable data base and the ability to identify the poorest households.
Nigeria is known for putting important things last, according to a World Bank report from a few years ago. How else to explain the desire to provide palliative care or assistance for the weak and the destitute without a strict procedure in place to determine who they are. It is a distinct matter since it is such a little money.
According to conversations around the N8000 per month for six months to 12 million homes, the intended beneficiaries are still dubious about the measures’ effectiveness. Most recipients also favour spending the funds on cross-regional highways and essential infrastructure, according to him.
He suggested that the Presidency hire social scientists and professionals to help it create criteria that are impenetrable by wrongdoing so that prospective beneficiaries may be identified. “It’s excellent that the federal government itself saw how disconnected it is from the general public and how ineffective it was at managing the scheme. The exercise would entirely fall on local governments if we were collaborating with them.
“The lesson in the conundrum that the federal government confronts with this effort to aid the poor is that it will not produce the desired results unless it is guided by science. not only on this particular intervention, but in all other aspects as well.
Nigeria should never put the waggon before the horse and always use its brains. Knowledge should always come first and never come last in everything we undertake.
