Leon Usigbe
Rivers, Imo and Akwa Ibom states have been dropped from the N24 billion ($60 million) rural Livelihood Improvement Family Enterprises Project-Niger Delta (LIFE-ND) due to the failure of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) to honour its pledge of $30 million counterpart funding for the initiative.
The project is supposed to have been funded equally by the NDDC and the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) and was meant for the nine states covered by the commission.
It is designed for the transformation of the rural economy to drive prosperity and equal benefit in the benefitting communities.
But LIFE-ND has been forced to prune down the area of coverage to six states because of the non-release of the $30 billion pledged.
Presenting the LIFE-ND Implementation Performance at a media roundtable in Port Harcourt on Friday, the National Project Coordinator (NPC, Engineer Abiodun Sanni, said that it had been unable to expand because of NDDC’s failure to remit the money since 2019.
Explaining why the three states had to drop out, he said that given the lack of adequate funds for the initiative, which restricted it to six states, the NDDC had earlier approached LIFE-ND asking it not to remove the three states with the promise to provide the pledged sum.
Sanni explained how the initiative eliminated the three states, saying: “We said we will look at the performance of these nine states in the previous project, they will be ranked, the first six will be selected and the last three will be dropped.
“And what’s the base of assessing? How well did the various states key into the project and how do you determine the level of acceptability and keying in? It is in form of counterpart funding contribution.
“So, it was discovered that states of Akwa Ibom, Imo and Rivers performed woefully in the payment of counterpart funds and they were now dropped and we now have six states.
“NDDC now said over their dead body, ‘you cannot drop three states, we are ready to put our funds into the project, we are going to support the three states.’ That was why NDDC said “we are going to put $30 million to match the $60 million that is supporting six states as a match-up.
“That was the design that was now conceptualized and the project now started in 2020.”
The NPC stressed that the N24 billion received to finance the donor project in six states for six years is grossly inadequate, hence, it cannot expand beyond its present scope.
He said that 10 local governments and 10 agrarian communities are picked from each of the six benefiting states based on poverty level, youth unemployment, community involvement conflict-free nature, level of agricultural activities and private sector involvement.
Sanni noted that despite its challenges, LIFE-ND has contributed to Nigeria’s strategic objective on food security, household income and job creation.
He said it recorded production output of over 2,176.06 MT of agricultural produce and injected an approximate gross income value of over N1,877,820,583 into the national economy, among others.
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