What VP Osinbajo Told Nigerian Community In New York About Npower And NSIP Scheme

You know Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is currently in U.S. to meet with US Vice President. He had the opportunity to meet with the Nigerian community in a townhall meeting in new York and had this to say. Read below:

I had the priviledge of meeting members of the Nigerian community at a townhall meeting in New York. We had an interesting time discussing issues. Permit me to share a bit of what we discussed.

Nigeria has never systematically addressed the poverty problem in the way that India, which used to have the largest population of poor people, have done. As at 2010, Nigeria had a population of about 112.7 million people living in extreme poverty and there was nothing in place to address the problem, no social investment programme, no social security, no way of systematically getting people out of poverty.

President Muhammadu Buhari's administration launched the Social Investment Programmes to systematically address poverty through the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) where we give interest-free loans to petty traders, conditional cash transfer and NPower.

On health care funding, the Federal Government is committed to addressing the challenge of inadequate funding through an innovative approach that takes care of the poor in the society.

First, we followed the provision of the Health Act which says that 1% of our Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) must go to health care and we implemented this. We set aside 1 % of the CRF for health. The challenge however is we cannot deal with health care from government budget alone. This is the reason why the National Health Insurance is very important for us. An amendment has been effected to make contributory

For us, one of the problems to address is the large numbers of poor people.o‚ in determining what that premium will be, we decided that government will pay 35% of the premium so that those who cannot afford to pay are taken care of by government.

On leveraging human capital in the Diaspora to complement development efforts in Nigeria, the establishment of the Diaspora Commission by the Buhari administration was one of the ways to show government's commitment to work with Nigerian professionals in the Diaspora. We believe very strongly that the Diaspora is an important partner in all the things that we are doing.