Fundamentally, poverty alleviation and productive youth engagement remain major challenges of modern economies around the world today. Nigeria is no exception. To cage a poor enterprise culture and mainstream poverty alleviation, a full-blown ministry under the Muhammadu Buhari administration was birthed and carefully designed poverty alleviation programmes and skills acquisition projects became major drivers of change, despite the extreme challenges of the period.
Then named the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, ably led by the Honourable Minister, Hajiya Sadiya Umar-Farouq, it is now rechristened Ministry for Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation led by Betty Edu. Today, it has been tweaked by the Bola Ahmed Tinubu presidency; the successor regime to Buhari’s.
Just recently, some online news and social media platforms went into a feeding frenzy over spurious, alleged links of the former Minister, Sadiya Umar-Farouq with the activities of a certain Mr. James Okwete reportedly being investigated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) over alleged financial improprieties.
Reports of this foggy linkage are clearly products of mischief makers who take delight in defamation, especially from some temporary positions of authority. Sadiya Umar-Farouq is proud to have served her country as Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria with every sense of responsibility and would defend her actions, stewardship and programmes during her tenure whenever called upon to do so.
Hajiya Sadiya Umar-Farouq is not in any way linked with the activities of Okwete who is reportedly being investigated by the EFCC over alleged financial misdemeanours. She does not know the said Okwete nor has he ever represented her in any way whatsoever. Therefore, linking her with him in whatever guise is most inappropriate and verges on mischief.
This makes it a major puzzle why suddenly some online media platforms are stridently trying to smear the lady’s image. It can then only be seen as a funded agenda by shadowy crisis entrepreneurs.
No wonder, the recourse to diminishing the impact of Sadiya Umar-Farouq appears logical and a fair game. But a more rigorous, logical analysis of poverty alleviation dynamics in a stuttering national economy suggests this is totally wrong and unfair.
Cut to the bone, these unmerited, obviously paid-for and scurrilous attacks represent deliberate weaponisation of misinformation for untoward ends. Sources close to the ex-minister have stated she is not familiar with the said Okwete.
Even under a new political dispensation, an analysis of Sadiya Umar-Farouq stewardship and legacies over some of the most challenging years of the national journey including two recessions, the seismic Covid-19 pandemic and global disruptions seeded by the new nationalism that swept Europe and North America will certainly not diminish but highlight her tenure’s positives.
The agencies under the supervision of the humanitarian ministry under reference whose financial activities attracted the attention of the anti-graft agency had their budgets independently and exclusively administered by them as long as expenditures do not exceed the threshold envisioned in the Public Procurement Act, of 2007, as amended. Extant service regulations have clearly defined these procedures.
If proposed expenditures go above the threshold, the agencies would revert to the higher authorities for ministerial, or other approvals. However, the agencies, in their judgment, ensured that expenditures for contracts were below ministerial or other approvals. So the agencies, as learnt, did not need to seek ministerial approvals. These are basic, if routine facts, the ex-Minister would explain when she honours EFCC’s invitation.
Not one to back away from clarifying needful positions, the ex-minister has acknowledged the huge responsibilities she bore while in office, requiring the supervision of the nation’s poverty mitigation programmes. The figures involved often sound enormous, because of the nation’s huge poverty level, against the background of government determination to alleviate the people’s plight.
Adroitly navigating under former President Buhari’s broad and often controversial development vision, the then Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development fundamentally impacted the dynamics of that intervention niche through specific innovative measures that touched many lives.
Tracking back, not many would’ve forgotten that, conceived in 2016, the Buhari administration’s carefully designed poverty alleviation programmes and skills acquisition projects assumed a multi-dimensional footing cutting across all facets of age groups, educational strata and geographies. These were the N-Power Programme and other National Social Investment Programmes (NSIPs) – job creation and empowerment initiatives.
The N-Power was designed for both young graduates and non-graduates. It was the flagship component of the federal government’s Social Investment Programme (SIP). Others are the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, Government Enterprise and Entrprenuership Programme (GEEP) under which Tradermoni, Marketmoni and Farmermoni are captured and the Conditional Cash Transfer.
Fundamentally, the N-Power was a job creation and empowerment initiative. It was designed for both young graduates and non-graduates in order to harness their skills for innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity. The targeted sectors are in the nation’s critical areas of needs in education, agriculture, health, technology, creative industry, construction and artisanal industries.
It is hardly disputable that the driving forces of economic growth and social development pivot around skills and knowledge. Notwithstanding the current high level of unemployment, harnessing the nation’s young demography through appropriate skill development efforts provides an opportunity to simultaneously achieve national inclusion and productivity. Not surprisingly, large-scale skill development is the main policy thrust of the N-Power Programme.
The key N-Power Programmes include: N-Power Agro, N-Power Tax, N-Power Build, N-Power Creative, N-Power Health, N-Power Teach, N-Power Tech Hardware and N-Power Tech Software. N-Power is also linked to the Federal Government’s policies in the economic, empowerment and social development arenas
The programme addressed the challenge of youth unemployment by providing a structure for large scale and relevant work skills acquisition and development while linking its core and outcomes to fixing inadequate public services and stimulating the larger economy.
The modular programmes under N-Power ensured that each participant learns and practices most of what is necessary to find or create work. The N-Power Volunteer Corp involved a massive deployment of 500,000 trained graduates who will assist to improve the inadequacies in the public services in education, health and civic education. Some of these graduates will also help in actualising Nigeria’s economic and strategic aspirations of achieving food security and self-sufficiency.
Good a thing Sadiya Umar-Farouq’s lawyer, Sir Oladipo Okpeseyi, SAN, has stepped in to clarify matters so that her detractors would be logically hobbled and denied the pleasures of their failed smear project.
Read him: “She did not shun the invitation extended to her by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). She was eager to make herself available to offer clarifications to operatives of the anti-graft agency who were looking into the books of two financially independent agencies under the ministry, including the National Social Investment Programme Agency (NSIPA).
“I was at the headquarters of the Commission on Tuesday to submit a letter to that effect and to seek an extension of time (a shift in date) to enable my client, Hajiya Sadiya Umar Farouq, to make herself available at another opportune time to offer clarifications about activities of some agencies under the ministry she superintended in the immediate past administration.
“Although the EFCC has yet to send me a formal reply, the leadership availed us of its understanding, which resulted in parties amicably agreeing to have the interview originally scheduled for Wednesday (January 3, 2024) postponed to a time that the Commission would subsequently fix after looking through its schedules.”
This couldn’t have been more succinctly delivered. In effect, once the coast is clear and a new date is fixed by the Commission, Sadiya Umar-Farouq, his client, would be available to answer questions and offer clarifications on the areas of her stewardship that are not clear to the Commission.
Hence, according to Sir Oladipo Okpeseyi, SAN, “the impression created in a section of the media that my client was being invited for alleged misappropriation of funds is false. That is not the case in this circumstance. She has been invited to clarify certain expenditures by some agencies under her ministry. That is all.”
Strengthening the economic recovery process in Nigeria is clearly not a picnic. As it is, when the project was or is being guided by patriots who genuinely believe in Nigeria, who have unflinching faith in the ingenuity of Nigerians and who hold dear, the promise of the nation’s shared future, they should be honoured, not reviled.
Hajiya Sadiya Umar-Farouq is one such patriot and certainly does not deserve the weaponisation of misinformation against her person.

● Achi, a development journalist, contributed this piece from Abuja.

There is Time for everything. Figuratively speaking, a person or country can be asked, “What Time is it?” with an intention to trigger a deep rumination from those who should know or care. The start of the New Year after a bloodied end of 2023 with yet another mass brutal killings of over 150 children, youth, women, and men during the Christmas week, in several villages of Plateau State did provide the context for one to ask. So, I ask first, those among my fellow citizens who have only always hoped against hope that our country will ultimately Become, “What Time is it for Nigeria?” I next ask all those who have held and the ones currently holding political and public leadership positions in the country, “What Time is it for Nigeria?”
The blood of Fidelis Solomon and over one hundred and fifty other victims gruesomely massacred in the latest Plateau State carnage, and the blood of the hundreds of thousands of innocent Nigerians cumulatively killed in the North Central, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, Southsouth and Southwest regions of our country are crying, “What Time is it for Nigeria?” What is your answer, fellow citizens?
This really is the hardest question that all the people of goodwill in Nigeria must ask and answer candidly. Anyone who attempts to evade asking and confronting the inevitable tough answer to this question merely lives in delusion.
For me, it is the critical time to confront the hard conversations on how to create a viable Nigeria that transits from mere country to a nation of people who though diverse have collectively negotiated to unite themselves around a shared sense of nationalism to build a just, equitable, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, stable, resilient, and ethical society based on shared values, national vision and common identity. It is the most feasible way to avoid Nigeria becoming a truly bankrupt country with all her people.
Bankruptcy, an extremely scary word was recently used by Nigeria’s National Security Adviser (NSA), Mallam Nuhu Ribadu to describe the financial situation of the country. In his words: “We are facing very serious budgetary constraints. It is okay for me to tell you. It is fine for you to know. We have a very serious situation… We have inherited a very difficult country, a bankrupt country to the extent that we are paying back what was taken. It is serious”.
Bankruptcy in corporate use, means the death of an entity because it stops all operations and goes completely out of business. Death is the loss of soul. Like humans, a country also has a soul, and it contains the values and boundaries of what is acceptable or abhorrent behavior. For example, in Nigeria, there was a time when a certain modicum of values served as filters of what behaviors were rewarded and punished. The soul of our country began to die when public leaders became bad examples, disdaining values and rewarding vices. As the people either helplessly watched on or simply did not care and many chose to join the leaders in sliding the scale of values, the soul of Nigeria started to erode. The soul of the country has eroded to a degree where today, the value and respect for human life is closer to zero than to one.
The bankruptcy of a country and people which relegates the dignity of life is much more damaging than empty public coffers. Public leaders who do not value the life of their fellow human being bankrupt the soul of their country. The cyclical pattern of empty coffers in a country vastly endowed with the natural, human, and other resources to have emerged as a globally productive and competitive economy is a factor of Nigeria’s values bankruptcy. The Nigerian-State run by governments which are inured to the debasement of human lives is bankrupt of soul.
We shockingly arrived a time in our country when regardless of the number of mass abductions, maiming and killings of fellow humans being in our country, the Nigerian-State moves on without an iota of accountability and consequence for especially murderous criminals. We are in a time when Nigerians have normalized and accepted that their governments and leaders can conduct, enable, or ignore acts of impunity. A time in which the lines between reward and punishment are so blurred that the country exists without any form of deterring consequence for the most atrocious behaviors.
So, even though evidence abound in our public finance data to support Ribadu’s assessment of the current state of the country’s finance, Nigeria’s reality is worse than mere financial bankruptcy. An empty treasury is the least of insolvencies that stymie Nigeria and Nigerians. The substantial and existential danger is that Nigeria as a country is totally bankrupt of values, void of soul and headed into a cataclysmic collapse of the kind that more money cannot change. What can more money do to reverse the callous acceptance of a brutish, short, and nasty existence into which majority Nigerians have now acculturated their minds?
What will more money do for a people who no longer expect their leaders to take responsibility for basic duties including accountability for failure to produce results? What can more money do for a country that kidnapping of citizens grew into an industry nationwide? The Nigeria we all lament today is a sad example of what failure to agree and uphold a national integrity and values system can do to any people. Nigerians chose to be lethargic to how our country is governed, so our public leaders willfully distorted incentives and sanctions in our society.
Yes, the public coffers are empty, but the time now is to tackle the cause and not one of the symptoms of our national bankruptcy as a country and people. Nigeria must first overcome the existential sustainability question as our top priority agenda at this time. Is it not staggeringly alarming that Nigeria’s contemporary peer-countries are contending to lead the 21st Century by shifting global economic dominance while we in contrast are steadily regressing farther away from being a country? Nigeria’s multiple existential threats to retaining the status of country are fiercer than ever before. We now barely tick the boxes for the full status of a country, properly so called.
A Nigeria that is fast losing most of the basic criteria that qualified us to be included in the United Nations list of recognized countries should alarm all patriots into action to save and avoid the tendentious pattern of our political class tunnelling our focus to addressing symptoms instead of their underlying causes.
Our evident state of affairs is that Nigeria now more than ever before ticks closest to the box of a failed state on the criteria of renowned Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine. The index annually uses Economic, Political and Social factors to evaluate fragility and resilience of countries. Nigeria has every year over the last ten years remained within the group of 15 countries out of 170 that rank closest to fragile-failed country status. For example, on the economic front, Nigeria is entangled with endemic issues of systemic and widespread grand as well as petty corruption, “high economic inequality, economic development along group line, low growth, severe economic decline and rising extreme poverty”.
In the context of the Fragility Index on the political front, Nigeria experiences “breakdown of capacity of government to function usually characterized by delegitimization of the state, deterioration of public services, suspension, or arbitrary application of law; widespread human rights abuses, security forces operating as a “state within a state” often with impunity, rise of factionalized elites, and rise of external political agents and foreign states”.
On the social metrics, the index evaluates Nigeria’s “depleting social capital, loss of social cohesion, a squandering and poor management of its diversity, demographic pressures and tribal, ethnic and/or religious conflicts, massive internal and external displacement of refugees, creating severe humanitarian emergencies, widespread vengeance-seeking group grievances and sustained human flight” and such like.
It will amount to a historical missed opportunity if Nigerians do not in 2024 collectively resist the syndrome of tunneling our focus to the lowest common denominator of our problems. The Federal Government in its current narrative about public financial distress is leading everyone down that path because even though it is true that Nigeria and Nigerians are faced with the severest fiscal distress ever experienced in recent history, our single-minded focus must be the battle for the Soul of Nigeria. No amount of money from higher oil prices, tax collections and more domestic and external debts can win this battle for us.
More money cannot save a country and people that have lost their soul. Even then, the fact is that from all evidence available in the public domain, additional money earned by Nigeria now merely and mostly feed the avarice and voracious greed of Nigeria’s politicians anyway as the budget process has often revealed. The question that should therefore seize the minds of citizens of Nigeria and move all in the direction of the right actions is found in the timeless words of scripture; “Behold, what does it profit a man, nay, a woman and people of a country, to gain the whole world but lose their soul?”
There is a raging battle for the Soul of Nigeria, a country which has turned into a massive killing field and mass graves overrunning with the blood of innocent children, youth, women, and men brutally murdered, battered or abducted without any consequence to the criminals.
Every Nigerian of goodwill – regardless of ethnicity, religion, economic status, and political persuasion – knows that the Nigeria we once knew is gone. The collective momentum must now swiftly gather to the tipping point for Nigerians to compel a legally mandated National Conversation that will fundamentally negotiate and determine the value we place on our lives and the values that will uphold, preserve, and dignify a New Nigeria and Nigerians. Throughout history, dead countries commenced their dying when human life ceased to have worth. This is the kind of time Nigeria find itself, but we can by a collective will confront the demons that have dwarfed the realization of our country’s giant potentials and change the course of our checkered history.
Could this be the ironic time a lethally flawed government of President Bola Tinubu which continues struggling with crisis of legitimacy, makes the urgent and historic choice to facilitate and enable a New Constitutional Process credibly co-led by citizens? Will the Tinubu administration surprise us and choose the good of Nigeria and Nigerians this Time?
Will he take up the gauntlet at this Time and ask himself the question, “What Time is it for Nigeria?” Can Tinubu’s candid answer be that it is “The Time for me to do right by the Citizens of Nigeria?”.
There is indeed Time for everything, and Nigerians are anxiously waiting. It is Time.

Obiageli “Oby” Ezekwesili, a former Minister of Education and Solid Minerals, is Founder and Chairperson of the Board of the School of Politics, Policy and Governance (SPPG)