The Senior Special Assistant to the Vice-President on Media and Publicity, Mr. Laolu Akande, yesterday in Abuja said the newly launched Jobs portal of the federal government, “N-Power. gov.ng,” has recorded over 400,000 successful registrations since it opened for submissions on Sunday.
Akande, in a statement yesterday, said all together, the website had received over 35 million hits since Saturday midnight.
The statement also quoted, Afolabi Imoukhede, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Job Creation, as saying: “We have been very impressed by the enthusiastic response to the call for applications. As at noon on Monday, June 13, only 36 hours after the launch of the portal, 403,528 applicants had successfully registered on the site and were in the middle of completing the application process.
“We are also very pleased that the registrations have been taking place without any hitches or system failures, considering the volume of response.”
The Jobs Scheme, known as ‘N-Power’, is one of the five initiatives of the Social Investment Programmes of the Federal Government of Nigeria, described by President Muhammadu Buhari in his Democracy Day speech as “by far the most ambitious social protection programme in our history”.
A total sum of N500 billion has been provided for the programme in the 2016 Budget, an unprecedented development in Nigeria’s budget history.
N-Power is designed to help young Nigerians acquire and develop life-long skills to become solution providers in their communities and to become players in the domestic and global markets.
It will provide employment opportunities for 500,000 graduates as teachers, agriculture extension advisers, healthcare assistants, and civic and adult education instructors in communities across Nigeria.
There will also be a pool of 100,000 software developers, hardware service professionals, animators, graphic artists, building services professionals, artisans and others.
Applications for the scheme commenced on Sunday June 12 on the portal:www.npower.gov.ng.
The statement reads: “The Buhari presidency assures all Nigerians that this application process would not only be structurally robust, transparent and fair, the selection process that will follow would also be based on objective criteria that has nothing to do with party affiliations.
“Unemployed Nigerians both graduate and non-graduates would be drawn from across the country on state by state basis in the final analysis.”
(THISDAY)
