- Calls on FG to Fund Health and Pension For Informal Workers
THE Federation of Informal Workers’ Organisations of Nigeria (FIWON) Wednesday criticised the inadequacy of President Bola Tinubu’s newly announced palliative measures aimed at mitigating the impact of petroleum subsidy removal.
A press statement signed by the General Secretary of the Union, Comrade Gbenga Komolafe, on July 13, 2023, criticized President Bola Tinubu’s Fuel Subsidy Removal Palliative as being too little to make a difference in relieving the overwhelming poverty that has enveloped Nigeria.
The statement, made available to National Record, highlighted the devastating effects of the currency redesign policy and the subsequent removal of subsidies on premium motor spirit (PMS), which has led to the destruction of millions of micro and small businesses.
The statement also called for the government to address the issue of social protection mechanisms for informal workers and to plug macroeconomic leakages to fund development projects that can help overcome poverty and misery in the country.
The press statement reads in part: “As reported in the media, the grant ‘will enable the transfer of the sum of eight thousand naira (N8,000) monthly to twelve (12) million poor and low-income households for a period of six months with a multiplier effect on about sixty (60) million individuals.’ The grants will be disbursed through the much abused ‘Conditional Cash Transfer’ window.”
“The first issue with this is that the amount of money to be disbursed to beneficiaries is truly so paltry. N8000 naira or about USD10 per month in today’s exchange rate really cannot feed a child of 5 years in 30 days talk less of supporting ‘…all vulnerable Nigerians’ to meet the cost of basic needs’ as announced under the programme. We would also question how they arrived at the figure of ‘12 million poor and low-income households’ in a country with over 130 million people suffering from ‘multi-dimensional poverty’ according to official statistics. Who are these 12 million Nigerians, how were they identified? It is critical to raise this because similar programs in the past suffered so much from poor targeting that relatively privileged Nigerians had their accounts credited with N10,000 ‘MarketMoni” while most market women only heard about the program on the radio.”
“Under the Federal Government National Social Investment Programme (NSIP), easily the most ambitious financial intermediation programme in recent decades, similar programs to this newly announced program were implemented especially between 2017 and 2019 with billions of dollars invested in them. But development experts and observers have lamented the ‘unprecedented lack of transparency and accountability’ witnessed in fund application especially with regard to Tradermoni aspect of GEEP. The programs were bedeviled with so much politicization, ethnicity, favouritism and nepotism brought to bear on the generation of data and other vital indicators.”
“We therefore use this occasion to call on the federal government to urgently revise the National Social Protection Policy to practically address the problem of exclusion of informal workers from old age support system, maternity care and support system as well as the need for accident insurance. Existing structures created to address these issues such as NHIS and MPP hardly scratch the surface of the challenge of coverage. 90 per cent of working people in the informal economy cannot continue to be excluded from social protection mechanisms while we pretend to be fighting poverty! To achieve accelerated coverage, Government must be ready to part fund informal workers’ contribution to the health and pension funds just as employers’ part fund workers in the organized sectors.”
