By Aliyu Baraje
Dear Ma,
Your efforts in addressing unemployment in the country are commendable and well acknowledged. Your ministry has taken bold steps to achieve the primary purpose of its creation. Honourable minister, I write to thank you for fulfilling your promise of ensuring that the exited N-power beneficiaries will not be left to continue roaming the streets of Nigeria jobless, especially now that the country battles with various security threats.
Your assistant, @annekaikem1, on her Twitter handle on January 29, 2022, announced that the exited N-power beneficiaries should dial a certain code (*45665) to verify and confirm their availability for an N-exit loan training from February 1 to 4th 2022. The N-power Twitter handle also affirmed it by posting the same information on February 1.
My main worry now is that most beneficiaries have been experiencing difficulty verifying and confirming their availability for the training. As a result, tens of thousands of eligible beneficiaries are on the verge of giving up. This is due to the technical problems they’re experiencing during the application processes. Beneficiaries have been dialling the code since day one but to no avail. Others have started but were timeout before completing the task.
Given the above, I, on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of N-power beneficiaries that are grateful for your commitments to ensure they have a better future, plead with you to consider the following:
1) Extend the deadline for the verification and availability.
2) Increase the seconds for a timeout while a beneficiary is connected to the server.
3) The honourable minister should also consider creating and sharing another code for the beneficiaries to quickly complete the tasks if the glitches were due to congestion on the server.
4) The honourable minister should also refer beneficiaries to their dashboards since it is already there. This would reduce the cost of the charges on them.
5) And if service providers cause these difficulties, the ministry should kindly reach out to them before the deadline.
With due respect and appreciation, I write this to call your attention. If the situation is left to continue as it is, hundreds of thousands of applicants are likely to be deprived of this great opportunity.
I have complete confidence the honourable minister would urgently look into the matter to proffer a solution. However, I was discouraged when I found out that in two local governments, which I had firsthand information on, not even ten beneficiaries had completed the task. Moreover, the responses I saw on social media handles of the N-power minister’s assistants, beneficiaries’ groups and blogs are very alarming.
Although this is supposed to be the first batch, we hope the honourable minister would do the needful to address the technical problems so that the subsequent ones would be more successful.
Thank you.
Aliyu Baraje can be reached via glitzinkreviews@gmail.com.