TheCable

Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), says Nigeria’s social investment programmes have been politicised.

Atiku said this on Sunday at the People’s Townhall, a Channels Television programme.

The former vice-president faulted some of the social programmes of the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari. 

He criticised initiatives such as TraderMoni and MarketMoni otherwise known as Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP).

“I think the defect in the system is not incorporating the system into an institutionalised process because what I understood TraderMoni and Market (Moni) [to be] is either the vice-president going around distributing money or the minister of humanitarian affairs going round and distributing money, ” he said. 

“Why not create institutions that can actually attend to every sector of the economy as far as this MarketMoni or TraderMoni is concerned? As we said, we are going to vote N10 billion to boost small and medium enterprises. 

“We have a number of institutions where such funding can be channelled so that it is institutionalised, instead of personalising it and also using it for political purposes because currently, MarketMoni and TraderMoni have become political tools to promote political interests of a particular political party,” he said.

When asked if he would scrap the social programmes, the former vice-president said he desires to have a more effective social welfare system.

“What I am saying is that they should be incorporated into an institution, so that it survives every government that comes in,” he said. 

“The traders are not integrated because there is no institution. 

“If you have an institution to cater to that, the institution will be able to give everybody guidelines. This is how to access these funds and this is how long it is going to take you to repair them and so on.”