The National Economic Council (NEC) has decided to discard the national social register used by Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to implement its conditional cash transfer, because it lacks credibility.
The NEC meeting which was presided over by Vice President Kashim Shettima on Thursday at the Council Chamber, Presidential Villa, said the criteria used for the compilation of the register was unclear.
The Governor of Anambra State, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, while briefing State House correspondents on Thursday at the end of the meeting said contrary to what the previous administration projected, it was not possible to digitally transfer money to the poorest of the poor, the majority of whom were unbankable.
He pointed out that beneficiaries of the supposed transferred cash could not be identified in the villages.
Against this background, Soludo revealed that the NEC resolved that the states should come up with their own registers, using formal and informal means to develop it.
The governor assured that all beneficiaries at the sub-national level could easily be accessed that way.
His words: “We need to face the problem of the fact that we don’t have a credible register.
“Second thing I’d like to respond is in relation to the social register that has been mentioned. I think at the council today, there was almost near unanimity among members that there’s a big question mark about the integrity of the so called National Social Register.
“We have questions about how those names in the register were brought about and I’m sure one question I hear asked is where it is for the most vulnerable group, and so on and so forth.
“Let’s talk about a social register and then distributing things through the social register by digital means, implying that these people already have account numbers and they have phone numbers.
“Maybe we are talking about some other people and not Nigerians. The poorest 25 per cent of Nigerians are likely, if not totally unbanked, and don’t have access to telephone.
“Now in thinking through that, we felt that sitting in Abuja and calling on somebody in Anambra to compile a list and send it to you and then the person depends on who he brings, and the registers are generated and people go to those villages and ask where are those people and they don’t show up. This is stress testing. We think we need to go down back to the drawing board.
“If you are delivering any such national or federal programme from Abuja, it needs to be delivered via the governments that are there using their own format and mechanisms to generate the register that is comprehensive.
“So the integrity test is what is missing with that register. Many have just described what is being counted as national register as bogus, some describe it as a phantom, some in all manner of terms. So we need to face the problem, the fact that we don’t have a credible register and get back to work on this.