As many as 30,000 Nigerian youths and erstwhile N-Power beneficiaries hired as agriculture enumerators have cried out to the Nigerian government to pay their outstanding allowances, according to SaharaReporters.
Abdulkarim Abubakar Adamu, the National Chairman of FMARD enumerators in a statement said they were not fully paid their allowances since 2020 when they came in.
He said it was a sad thing for them to complete the programme and got dumped without being given the necessary entitlements.
Adamu added that several meetings had been held with the Special Adviser to the President on Agriculture in the Office of the Vice President, Dr. Andrew Kwasari, but nothing came out of it.
The statement read, “It is with a broken heart that we seek for justice from the Federal Government of Nigeria through the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to pay us our entitlement.
“It’s exactly two years now since the federal government of Nigeria through the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development engaged over 30,000 unemployed Nigeria youths (Exited Npower batch A and B volunteers) under a project tag “Agriculture for food and job plans (AFJP)” which is part of the Economic Sustainability Plan chaired by Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, to serve as enumerators to register famers and their farmlands across the country.
“This was done with an agreement (engagement letter) that N500 will be paid per valid survey, on the agreement letter, it was stated that the payment will be made on trenches, 50% will be paid on weekly basis while the remaining 50% will be paid at the end of every month after the data have been validated.
“We excitedly began work, to search famers in our communities and close by villages to register and map the geospatial coordinates of their farmlands using an android application known as ODK Collect.
“Despite the challenges and risk of the work we keep pushing but they fail to meet with their agreement on both the payment of the Enumerators and provision of farm inputs (palliatives and loan) to the famers we registered as promised.
“We worked from June 2020 to December 2021, whereby some of us were paid for their 50% from June to November 2020 and some have not been paid a penny yet. We have tried our best to contact them through the provided media channels but all effort ended abortive. We then decided to form a leadership group that will contact and meet them both at national and state levels.
“The National Chairman in person of Abdulkarim Abubakar Adamu has been able to meet several times with the National coordinator of the project in person of Dr. Andrew Kwasari who is a special adviser to the president on Agriculture in the office of the Vice President; yet the story is always the same that we should be patient; we will be paid. No date.”
“From the record release by the AFJP office from June 2020 to December 2021 we have registered over 8million famers on the AFJP database. The federal government of Nigeria through the Federal Ministry of Agriculture should please pay us our hard-earned money.”
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