Osinbajo made this disclosure through his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Laolu Akande while giving an update on the N-Power Volunteer Corps in Abuja on Sunday.
The N-Power Volunteer Corps is a paid volunteering programme of a 2 year duration, which will engage and train 500,000 young unemployed graduates.
So far, 200,000 Nigerian graduates, which is the first batch of the proposed 500,000 have been engaged by the Federal Government, with the scheme now reportedly advancing with assignment of beneficiaries to their places of deployments in their states of residence.
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Akande noted that over 90 per cent of the 200,000 unemployed graduates selected for the programme had been verified using the Bank Verification Number.
He referred to a BBC report last week regarding the testimonials of some of the selected Nigerian graduates who expressed satisfaction with the scheme.
According to him, “it is most gladdening that those who were selected are now telling the stories of how they have not been employed for years, but now grateful to the President for this initiative.”
The Senior Special Assistant stated that all the states and the FCT through the focal persons they appointed have since received the list of the 200,000, and now working on deploying the beneficiaries to their places of assignment.
He also explained that by using the BVN, there was hardly any way anything fraudulent could succeed in the process.
“We are confident that the selection process, all the way through with BVN, and physical verification at the points of deployment in the states and the local government areas, are both transparent and impossible to abhor ghost beneficiaries, or any kind of fraud,” he asserted.
Akande explained that 93% of those selected have been screened through the BVN, with the commendable assistance of the Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System Plc, NIBSS, and only authentic and verifiable beneficiaries will be paid the N30,000 monthly stipends starting December.
On the selection process, the SSA dismissed reports on random searches conducted on social media platforms, stating that the selection was not only fair and done transparently, but also with adequate care.
“Besides the BVN, there is going to be physical verification, through an in-built component in our selection system that requires that information submitted online during the application would have to be authenticated at the point of deployment across the country, including verification of academic credentials and residence status” he added.