Farouk was responding to an enquiry from Bethel Chigbo who asked about the Ministry's plan on the NEXIT Loan during the Chatham House Africa interaction Programme.
The Minister announced that the Training of about 300,000 exited Npower beneficiaries who have successfully declared interest on the NEXIT Loan Programme would commence in October, 2021.
The Humanitarian Affairs Minister however did not disclose any date or schedule for the Training while making the clarification during the Programme.
Roughly one month after the announcement, the Ministry has not released any date or any other official statement on the commencement of the NEXIT Loan Training.
The exited Npower beneficiaries had objected to the Training alleging that it was a plot to further delay the disbursement of the proposed Loan to the beneficiaries.
Till today Thursday, 21st October, 2021, no date has been fixed for the NEXIT Loan Training and no Scheduled has been released showcasing in any manner the Ministry's preparedness to disburse the proposed Loan to the exited Npower beneficiaries.
While agitation for the disbursement of the NEXIT Loan intensified among the exited beneficiaries, the overview of the NEXIT Programme appears unclear to many.
i) 200,000 beneficiaries will be engaged as financial services operators under the Shared Agent Network Expansion Facility (SANEF).
ii) 30,000 to be engaged beneficiaries as geospatial experts and enumerators in the Economic Sustainability Plan’s Mass Agric programme
iii) others would have the option of benefiting from the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) micro-enterprise loans.
Since after the Launch of the NEXIT Loan Programme in 2020, not much has been done to aid the exited Npower beneficiaries whose source of livelihood was cut short amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic and biting economic downtime, following the sudden termination of the Batch A and B Npower Programme.
Also, the Enumerators who were selected from the Npower beneficiaries to participate in the FMARDPace AFJP Project have in recent "open letter" to the Federal Government decried non-payment of their complete remuneration, even after disbursement of the AFJP Fertilizer Subsidy Grant to the enumerated Farmers.
Contained in the letter is also a call on the Federal Government to offer them engagement letters if they have been employed by the Federal Government as part of the NEXIT Programme.
These and more have posed obscurity and complicatedness to the proposed NEXIT Loan Programme which its implementation has lingered over a year since its launch in 2020.
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