Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) has said that cooperatives play a strategic role in implementing government’s social investment and interventions programmes and ensuring that a large number of people have access to the programmes
He said this on Monday when he received a delegation from the Cooperative Federation of Nigeria led by the President, Tajudeen Ayeola.
Osinbajo stated that cooperatives are “an important part of our strategy in ensuring that the largest number of Nigerians have access to government programmes.
“The partnership of cooperatives with government is possibly the only way of doing so in an efficient manner that ensures that government services and programmes get to the right people.
“Cooperatives give their memberships the leverage to be able to take facilities and make sure those facilities are returned. They also have more knowledge of their individual members,” Osinbajo noted, according to a statement by his spokesman, Laolu Akande.
The statement was titled, ‘How Large Number Of Nigerians Can Access Government’s Programmes – Osinbajo’.
Continuing, the VP said, “The rationale for cooperatives even in the 50s remains relevant today. When we talk about cooperatives in the Western Region and how these were very helpful and even cooperatives across the country became important pillars in the economic development of the country.”
Giving an instance where cooperatives have come in useful, the VP noted that “we thought that cooperatives would be very useful in all the programmes around the Economic Sustainability Plan. One of them is the Family Homes Funds and our plans to build 300,000 social housing” units.
He observed that “the case for cooperatives is very well made, and what we must do as a government is look for ways of cooperating with the Cooperative Associations in ensuring that we are able to get this moving.”
In his own remarks, the Managing Director of Family Homes Fund, which is implementing the Social Housing element of the Economic Sustainability Plan, Femi Adewole gave an update on the work done so far concerning the National Social Housing Programme.
He said, “As at year-end 2021, 17,281 homes are at various stages of construction, either completed or in progress across 15 States.”
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