174,000 N-Power Volunteers Receiving Stipends – FG

By Aaron Ossai
No fewer than 174,000 N-power volunteers in the Federal Government’s Social Intervention Programmes (SIPs) are being paid N30,000 monthly stipends without delay, the federal government has said.
Senior Special Assistant to the President on Job Creation, Mr. Afolabi Imokhuede who made this known in a chat with State House correspondents in his office in Abuja said “As we speak right now, about 86 per cent of them really have been paid.”
“Now when I mean 86 per cent after physical verification, as at last count in end of April; we had about 174,000 qualified, verified volunteers out of 200,000.
“We are currently right now doing a final reconciliation with all the states and FCT just to ensure, because we also found out that there were few cases of computation error, a few cases of omission at the point of digitalising the physical master list.
“The only ways we can know that; or some states get to know, is when these volunteers call the helpline or send e-mails complaining of non-payment.
“We then say to them; you cannot be paid because our records show that you are absent from verification’’, he explained.
Speaking further, the Presidential aide said the programme had been using focal persons, using N power coordinators in the states to act as the go-between the government and the volunteers to cross check their data adding that the complaints about non-payment arose because some volunteers could not reconcile their entries at the time of application with the information they presented during the validation exercise.
According to Imokhuede, most invalid verifications were caused by wrong Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) of the volunteers which could not be linked to the accounts they had submitted.
He also said some women, who applied with their maiden names but submitted their BVNs with their husband’s surnames also had issues with the verification and that a lot of them also applied in conformity with their certificates but a lot of such certificates were not in tandem with their BVN data.