File photo: N-Power volunteer graduates undergoing verification

The Senate has called for accountability in the management of the N-Power fund to ensure fairness and justice.

Chairman, Senate Committee on Poverty Alleviation, Mallam Ali Wakili, made the call when he featured on NAN Forum in Abuja.

The N-Power Programme was created by the Federal Government to drastically reduce youth unemployment with a focus to provide young graduates and non-graduates with skills to advance from unemployment to employment.

“The senate, at one of its sessions, adequately debated that issue. There are certain inadequacies that it has observed.

“There is a committee that is supposed to see the Vice President on these issues.

“There are certain anomalies that we did observe in the implementation.

Wakilli said that because of logistics, only the N-Power which has employed about 200,000 Nigerians, among other poverty alleviation programmes, was implemented.

“The School Feeding has just started; not all the states of the federation are being taken care of and even the N-Power that has started, it has come with some teething problem.

“People are saying why is it that it is the state of your residence that is being made applicable not your state of indigeneship.

“They are saying that if the constitution says that each and every federating part of the Nigerian state must be given a sense of belonging; then it means that there must be equity, there must be fairness, there must be justice.’’

He noted that the programme lacked logistics and no ministry or agency handling the programme.

“People are saying that because of non-accountability due to the fact that there is no MDA, the money should be shared among the 774 Local Government Councils existing in the constitution.

“And that if you do that, you can tie disbursement of the money to a project in every local government.

“You will have an industry that is localised within that place that can generate employment and produce things for the Nigerian state.

According to him, there is a Special Adviser in the office of the Vice President responsible for the N-Power, but the Federal Ministry of Budget and National Planning that is the custodian of the funds.

“What we are saying is that if this issue of School Feeding and this issue of teaching, are to be closely supervised, it is supposed to be done by the Federal Ministry of Education,’’ Wakili said. (NAN)