RETHINKING CONDITIONAL CASH TRANSFER
There is need for transparency in the management of the programme
The Minister of State for Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Tanko Sununu, said recently that by the end of August, no fewer than 2.2 million Nigerian households would have been reached with the conditional cash transfer. “The process is such that the National Social Safety-Net Coordinating Office {NASSCO) will now harvest vulnerable Nigerians based on their lowest cadre in the national social register,” Sununu said while making claims on the difference the programme had made on vulnerable Nigerians. He stated that N419 billion had been disbursed to five million Nigerians, with 71 per cent distributed in the northern part, and 21 per cent in the south of the country.
While we have nothing against this initiative, there are several questions begging for answers. Considering that there have been several such programmes in the past, what lessons were learnt from their failures? And what should be done differently this time? Although federal government officials have touted different figures to make claims about the success of the administration’s conditional cash scheme, there is not much evidence on the ground to suggest that it is working. Against the background of a worsening economic situation, we urge a greater level of transparency and accountability in the management of public resources.
We are more concerned that this transfer is not tied to anything beyond beneficiaries being recgnised as ‘poor’. There should be more to conditional cash transfer than sharing money. Several ideas have been tried in the past. Under the Goodluck Jonathan administration, for instance, the federal government paid women who attended antenatal clinics N5,000 each in the bid to tackle the menace of maternal mortality. The plan was executed as part of the Midwifery Service Scheme (MSS) introduced in 2010. More than 4,000 midwives were deployed to 1,000 health facilities nationwide under the MSS.
High maternal deaths in Nigeria have been traced to lack of accessible, acceptable and affordable primary, secondary and tertiary health care; lack of drugs, dearth of skilled personnel, and lack of access to skilled birth attendants. There are also lack of consumables, medical equipment, poor referral linkages in our hospitals; poor transportation and inability to access basic emergency obstetrical care. There are cultural factors too. For instance, in some parts of the country, without the express permission of their husbands, some women would not venture out of their homes, no matter how critical the circumstances. Research, however, reveals that most mothers avoid going to the hospital for ante-natal care because they cannot afford the bills.
Against the background of the virtual collapse of the welfare state that has accentuated corruption in the land, supporting conditional cash transfers designed with the specific purpose of enabling mothers to access healthcare to have their babies, is a deserving cause that requires serious government intervention. We believe it is the responsibility of government to understand the culture of its people and then adopt strategies for meeting critical challenges, even if it means rewarding them for engaging in what will benefit them in the long run.
Some of the conditions tied to this initiative included transfers for parents whose children were attending and staying in school. This is because, given the peculiarities in a diverse country such as ours, we cannot take it for granted that every pregnant woman would go for ante-natal or that every parent would send their children to school. These decisions, undoubtedly, belong in the private realm. But because of the poverty that prevails in many of our rural areas (and in some of the urban slums), and the absence of so much that government should ordinarily avail its citizens, interventions such as conditional cash transfers are important.
