The Federal Government has begun the partial payment of the N20,000 monthly stipend to the 774,000 beneficiaries of the Special Public Works programme. The Minister of State, Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo (SAN), disclosed this in a statement on Sunday titled, ‘NDE commences partial payment of SPW stipends.’
Recall that workers had complained about the delayed payment of their stipends which the government attributed to the mismatch of Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) and other details supplied by the beneficiaries.
But in his Twitter handle, Festus Keyamo said Access Bank has verified accounts for payment while the National Directorate of Employment has commenced payment into accounts with the bank.
According to him, the government was waiting for Zenith, UBA, FCMB, Fidelity, Heritage and Yobe Micro-finance Banks to settle their issues.
It read in part, “After the release of some of the funds by the Ministry of Finance for the payment of SPW stipends, I directed rigorous scrutiny of the accounts of the participants before payment.
“We discovered instances of accounts not matching BVNs, multiple accounts bearing a single BVN, non-existent BVNs, etc.
“Because of our determination to eliminate fraud, I further directed the NDE to write to the banks to clean up these anomalies before commencing payments.
“So far, only Access Bank has responded with accounts verified for payment and the NDE has today commenced payment of those accounts with Access Bank.”
