Lots of food vendors under the Social Investment Program in Benue State yesterday protested there purported removal from the program.
The women who took their protest to the state government in Makurdi, went with a song, “we no go gree o, we no go gree, we food vendors we no go gree.
One Dofan Natu who spoke on behalf of the women said that over four thousand of them were removed from the list of food vendors and replaced with others.
According to her, ‘we are protesting the deliberate removal of our names from the list of food vendors.
“We are the pioneer members of this program and since we started, there has never been a complaint about the food we cook for the school pupils.
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“On resumption of this academic session, we went to the state office of the Social Investment Program in Makurdi where we were informed that our names have been removed and replaced with others.
Reacting to the claim of food vendors, the focal person of the Social Investment Program in the state, Dr Terry Damusa said that they (food vendors) were not fully informed.
He noted that the problem was from the office in Abuja where they made a mistake in data reconciliation.
Damusa explained that the problem had led to the stoppage of the program in the state since the current academic session resumed, two weeks ago.
According to him, the office in Abuja directed that His Excellency the governor should aid us to do a pupil’s census and the governor graciously gave us the fund.
“We carried out the pupil’s enumeration and we gave Abuja a number of 569,233 pupils but the national office Abuja insisted that the number is too much.
” They sent staff of the National Bureau of Statistics to Benue State without our knowledge to carry out independent enumeration.
” They did not work with the state office here, we did not know which criteria they used but when Abuja sent us the report, the NBS staff visited only 114,000 schools and there are about 113,000 schools which they never visited.
“They only took statistics of pupils they physically saw, they ignored that others could not be in the schools, they didn’t bother to check the figures in the schools’ registers,” Damusa said.
and then