N-Power: FG to Recruit additional 300,000 Graduates

The Federal Government said it will soon recruit 300,000 additional graduates in the next phase of the N-power volunteer programme. The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, gave the assurance at the Old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa in Abuja yesterday at a special town hall meeting for the youth. The minister specifically stated that the Federal Government was committed to tackling youth employment.

“We did not create today’s hardships, but we have resolved to end it and make life more abundant for our people. All we ask is your undiluted support,” he said. Mohammed said 25,000 cooks have been trained for the home-grown school feeding programme which, he noted, has taken off in Osun, Kaduna and Anambra. He said over one million Nigerians willing to access loans between N200,000 and N100,000 were set to get such at a very low interest rate from the Bank of Industry. He further stated that N500 billion had been earmarked in the 2017 budget proposals to sustain the Social Intervention Plan. The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola, assured that the current economic recession would soon become a thing of the past.

“In the 1970s, there was a lot of money from oil, but by 1984, all the money was gone. My contact with recession was that it was difficult to get sugar at that time and there was no food to get at the school cafeteria. Events happened as a result of what we did as well as what we could not control like the global oil price,” he said. Fashola, who said the current negative growth would be reversed if the goods consumed in Nigeria were produced in the country, charged the youth to be productive.