Some staff members of the federal government's 774,000 Special Public Scheme have cried out after being owed for months.
Festus Keyamo
The federal government has been called out by some workers among its 774,000 Special Public Works scheme.
The staff lamented that the government has not paid them three months’ salaries, according to a report by Sahara Reporters.
The workers, in separate interviews with SaharaReporters, stated that most of them who used a certain commercial bank had yet to be paid their monies.
The Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo, had said in June that the salaries had been disbursed to the beneficiaries.
According to the data provided by the minister, about 413,630 Nigerians, drawn from rural communities and mostly itinerant workers, had been paid.
However, some of the beneficiaries explained that they had not received a dime from the money earmarked for the national project in the last three months.
Speaking on Monday, one of them stated that there were no remunerations in the bank accounts managed by the United Bank of Africa (UBA).
The two workers interviewed are residents of Ogbomosho in Oyo state.
Siyanbola Ojo said, “Majority of us have not been paid. I think there is a problem with those of us using UBA banks and maybe others. I went to complain in my bank. When they showed me the account details, they didn’t match my details. Maybe it was the ministry or the bank. They told me they were on it.
“Then on the website, there is a statement that always reads, ‘Based on your input the following participants(s) seem(s) to be on the main or supplementary selection list. The participant has not been registered but is on the list. Kindly register him or her.”
Corroborating the story, another affected beneficiary, Mr Oladeji Olanrewaju told SaharaReporters that he had not been paid for three months.
“I just discovered that there was nothing in my account. I went to my bank, that’s UBA. They said those of us with UBA bank accounts have not been credited. It’s for all the three months that we have not been paid. They just promised they would do something about it, but nothing yet,” Olanrewaju said.
The minister had claimed that the programme achieved a 60 per cent success rate.
“So, we started implementation in January 2020 in eight states. We just started one month into the implementation when COVID-19 struck. So, we could not actually complete the exercise at that time. The Federal Government released one-month stipends at that time to pay the beneficiaries in those eight states,” he had said.