Senator Chris Ngige, Minister of Labour and Employment, equated the Federal Government’s billions of Naira spent on social safety programmes to a triple vaccination against poverty.
Ngige made this statement to the media on Thursday in Abuja in connection with the 2022 World Day Against Child Labor, which would have the subject “Universal Social Protection to end Child Labour.”
Assuring that the Federal Government was energetically implementing its numerous social protection programmes to improve the lives of parents and children, the Minister who linked the problem of child labour to poverty.
According to him, “everything possible is being done to sustain the social protection programmes in spite of the dwindling revenue of the Federal Government.”
He noted that poverty, particularly in developing countries, was a driving force behind child labour and expressed hope that the evil could be eradicated by establishing social safety floors and programmes.
He claimed that the National Steering Committee on the Elimination of Child Labor and the Federal Ministry of Labor and Employment were using the occasion to advocate for increased funding for social protection programmes and schemes in order to create strong social protection foundations and safeguard children from child labour.
He clarified that social protection programmes are crucial to combating the vulnerability and poverty that have been recognised as the root causes of child labour.
He said, “Children engaged in this are badly endangered. The Government of Nigeria, through the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment, in collaboration with the ILO and other stakeholders have been working assiduously and collaboratively to ensure the elimination of Child Labour in line with SDG 8.7 and that young workers of legal working age are protected and work in safe conditions.
“Government is implementing vigorously the National Children School Feeding Programme (NCSFP) which is the major plank of the battle by the Federal Government to fight child labour, increasing children school enrollment and preventing them from dropping out of schools.”
He claimed that the food served to the children was high in protein and nutrients to promote their health, keep them in school, and give their parents jobs as farmers, traders, and cooks.
In an effort to stop children from working as minors, Ngige claimed that the government was also spending billions of Naira on the Universal Basic Education (UBE), which makes primary and junior secondary education free for kids.
According to him, the conditional cash transfer programme, the Trader moni and N-power programmes, the Youth Employment in Agriculture Program (YEAP), and the Technical Education Vocational Training (TVET) plan are all efforts to combat poverty.
He claimed that despite falling revenue, the government has been working to maintain all of these programmes.
“The MediumTerm Expenditure Framework (MTEF) shows that in 2023, if we continue with business as usual, without blocking leakages of oil theft, without functional refineries and removal of oil subsidy, we will have zero capital budget allocation. The economy will be prostrate. It is the capital projects aspect of economy that puts money in production. Every money in recurrent is for consumption. It doesn’t create jobs. Our earnings before and now are not the same. It calls for concern.”
Including the Boko Haram insurgency, banditry, and threat of unknown gunmen, he defined the current upheavals in the nation as a rebellion of the underprivileged against the powerful and the ignorant against the learned.
He urged developed nations to support the fight against child labour in Nigeria by investing in social protection, as well as large corporate organisations in Nigeria.
He bemoaned the fact that salaries for workers in the health and education sectors alone account for more than N2 trillion of the nation’s total wage bill of N3.7 trillion.
He claimed that the Academic Staff Union of Universities is opposing the Federal Government’s demand that every public servant enrol in the IPPIS because of this.
The Director of the International Labour Organization (ILO) country office for Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, Vanessa Phala, welcomed everyone and referred to the situation as very severe.
According to Phala, recent ILO research conducted in collaboration with UNICEF on the topic of “Social Protection in Elimination of Child Labour” found that more than 160 million children, or one in ten children aged 5 to 17, were still working as children worldwide, and that progress has stalled since 2016.