By Adul Ringim

There was high level drama on Tuesday as some senators walked the Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Mr Festus Keyamo, SAN, out of a meeting.

Reports showed that Mr Keyamo, traded words with members of the National Assembly over the National Directorate of Employment recruitment exercise.

Tension started when the Director-General of the NDE, Mr. Nasiru Ladan, could not defend the N52 billion budgeted for the recruitment of 774,000 Nigerians under the NDE.

The Minister said his ministry was asked to supervise the recruitments by the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd). But the federal lawmakers disagreed with Keyamo.

The Committee for the recruitment was just inaugurated by the Minister Monday Federal government on Monday principally to recruit one thousand (1,000) itinerant, unskilled workers each in all the 774 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Nigeria.

Addressing members of the Committee at the Ministry’s conference room, Abuja, Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo, SAN, told the members that the 1,000 persons they will recruit per LGA would be engaged by the Federal Government between October and December this year to carry out public works that are peculiar to each Local Government Area. They would be paid a total of N60, 000 each (that is N20, 000 per month). They would be engaged in roads rehabilitation and social housing construction, urban and rural sanitation, health extension and other critical services.

He also noted, “Depending on how successful the programme is or how buoyant the Federal Government’s purse is, this programme may either be extended or repeated every year. There are also various suggestions on some exit strategies for this programme, one of which is to move these workers to some agricultural projects, but nothing is concrete yet.”

According to him, I have used the word “principally” advisedly because, as my subsequent directives to you would indicate, there may be few exceptions we have to make in respect of supervisors and few skilled labour with respect to specific requests we have received from other Ministries, Agencies and Parastatals and in some cases, private organisations that their works are somewhat related to public activity.

“We reached this point today in our progressive march towards executing this programme after the painstaking work of an Inter-Ministerial Committee that I inaugurated on Wednesday, 29th April, 2020. This Inter-Ministerial Committee drawn from eight (8) Ministries and headed by the Director General of the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) made far-reaching recommendations on ways and means of executing this programme, one of which is the setting up of States’ Selection Committees to identify and recruit those to be engaged under the Programme.

“These Committees would also be saddled with the responsibility of identifying the public works to be executed in each of the LGAs in all the States. This would be in addition to projects already identified by several Federal Ministries, Agencies and Parastatals in different localities across the country.

“Having accepted the recommendations, we also ensured that the composition of the Committees is multi-sectoral and local enough to balance all the competing interests in the different States. Your selection therefore was a result of a painstaking process we carried out to ensure that we make the exercise as credible as possible.” Inputs from Channels Tv, The Punch