The Special Adviser to the President on Social Investment Programme, Mrs. Maryam Uwais, said wife of her principal lacked the competence to assess the performance of the social intervention scheme.
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Mrs. Aisha Buhari had during an interactive session with some women at the Villa, took a swipe at the N500bn programme and Mrs. Uwais suggesting she has underperformed.
“I don’t know where is the social investment programme. In my own state, only a local government benefited out of the 22. I didn’t ask what happened and I don’t want to know, but it failed woefully in Kano, it’s not a good sign and it’s not a good thing,” the first lady said.
The President’s wife’s veiled attack has however, drawn Mrs. Uwais’ comment, who in an interview she granted a Lagos based television monitored by our correspondent couched her response tactfully, saying: “I believe that if she (Mrs. Buhari) were to listen to the information that is out there, if she were to check on our data, she would be able to track all the beneficiaries. I’m saying that we have over 11,000 graduates that had been recruited and are working in every local government in her home state.
Continued: “We have non-graduates 440, we started the School Feeding Programme in October 2018, and we are in 1,054 in primary schools. We have only scratched the surface in the sense that we don’t have the sufficient funding to address it. We have, by our own data, at least 4.2 million indigenes of Adamawa state and, if we have done about 300,000 directly, I believe we could do so much more if we had sufficient funding.
“So, I’m saying that, yes, she may not have met them but the truth is we are there; we are in 12 local governments for the cash transfers and we are in 12 local governments also for the loans. We have, at least, 290,000 beneficiaries directly that we are paying in Adamawa state.”
