The presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, has criticised some of the social investment programmes of President Muhammadu Buhari.
He said some social investment programmes have been politicised.
Atiku said this while speaking at the People’s Townhall, a Channels Television programme, on Sunday.
He criticised initiatives such as TraderMoni and MarketMoni otherwise known as Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP).
MarketMoni and TraderMoni – Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) initiatives launched in 2017 and 2018, respectively – were created to boost the country’s economy through leverage and access to finance for petty traders.
“I think the defect in the system is not incorporating the system into an institutionalised process because what I understood TraderMoni and Market (Moni) [to be] is either the vice-president going around distributing money or the minister of humanitarian affairs going round and distributing money, ” Atiku said.
“Why not create institutions that can actually attend to every sector of the economy as far as this MarketMoni or TraderMoni is concerned? As we said, we are going to vote for N10 billion to boost small and medium enterprises.
“We have a number of institutions where such funding can be channelled so that it is institutionalised, instead of personalising it and also using it for political purposes because currently, MarketMoni and TraderMoni have become political tools to promote political interests of a particular political party,” he said.
When asked if he would scrap the social programmes, the former vice-president said he desires to have a more effective social welfare system.
“What I am saying is that they should be incorporated into an institution, so that it survives every government that comes in,” he said.
“The traders are not integrated because there is no institution.
“If you have an institution to cater to that, the institution will be able to give everybody guidelines. This is how to access these funds and this is how long it is going to take you to repair them and so on.”
