2016 Budget Will Lift Millions Of Nigerians Out Of Poverty – Lai Mohammed

Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has said that the 2016 budget will lift millions of Nigerians out of poverty.

Mohammed also denied reports of a disagreement between the legislature and the executive with regards to the budget.

The minister made the comment on Thursday, March 31, 2016, during a visit to the corporate headquarters of Leadership newspapers in Abuja.

“There is absolutely no rift, no issue of budget being sent back. Things are just taking their due course. It takes a few days (after the passage) for the National Assembly to clean up the document in readiness for the President’s assent,” Mohammed said.

“The first is the employment of 500,000 unemployed university graduates who we are going to train as teachers. Two, we are also employing 370,000 unemployed non-graduates, people with National Diploma and Technical Certificate.

“The third tranche is the social intervention targeted at 1 million people made up of market women, traders and artisans to be trained and given loans through their cooperatives.

“The fourth one is the home-grown One-Meal-A-Day Programme. Here we are targeting several millions of pupils in primary schools all over Nigeria. The exponential effect of this one meal a day is huge. Even if we are targeting five million pupils and we are giving each of them one egg a day, you are talking about five million eggs that will be provided by our poultry farmers. This will also help to increase the demand for maize and then you are going to employ people all around,” he added.

Meanwhile, President Muhammadu Buhari has said that he will analyse the budget critically before signing it.