FG to sack 111,000 workers

The Presidential Committee on Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) yesterday said it may lay off 111,000 workers by September 30 if additional funds are not made available to it.

SURE-P Chairman, Dr. Christopher Kolade made this known to the Senate Ad-Hoc Committee on SURE-P in Abuja yesterday.

Kolade told the Senator Abdul Ningi-led committee that SURE-P employed 3,000 workers each from the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and out of its budget of N27 billion earmarked as workers’ salaries, captured under its employment generation scheme, only a paltry N9 billion was approved in the 2013 budget.

He said the development had hindered its target of employing 5,000 workers per state and the FCT on a monthly allowance of N10,000 each.

With that development, Kolade told the senators that SURE-P would not be able to meet its commitment to the 111,000 youths already engaged under the programme.

“This year, for instance, I mentioned the fact that our target was to provide employment opportunity to 5,000 youths per state including the FCT and we started last year and in fact, in all the states, we got to the level of 3,000 youths per state.

“We pay each of these people N10,000 per month so there is a lot of money involved in this. For instance, in our budget to get to 5,000 per state this year and to maintain all of them, we needed 28.5 billion .

“What we estimated in the budget was N27 billion and this the Federal Government agreed and passed on to the National Assembly but when the budget came back from the National Assembly we found out that the N27 billion had been reduced to N9 billion; so there is a shortfall.”