A register of vulnerable ghosts

“There is a big question mark on the integrity of the so-called national social register,” said Governor Charles Soludo, adding that “we don’t have a credible register.” Speaking to the press after the July meeting of the National Economic Council, the Anambra State governor, along with his colleagues, reached a consensus that the register had evident shortcomings. Consequently, they advocated for its replacement with a more tailored approach—one that would address the unique characteristics of each state, enabling governors to discern the vulnerabilities within their jurisdictions.

The register, which has been a polarising document due to the maligned public figures adopting it to implement the government’s cash-transfer programmes and palliative measures, was curated by the National Social Safety-Net Coordinating Office (NASSCO).

The process in which the data was collected and collated, as advertised by the curating office, has come under attack. This is why Nigeria deserves a credible, comprehensive database of all citizens, and that effort must start with mandatory birth and death registrations becoming a part of our national tradition.

What the governors expressed at the second NEC meeting aligns with the reactions to the social intervention programmes rolled out under President Muhammadu Buhari. The register was often mocked in scathing criticism of the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and Social Development, Ms Sadiya Umar Farouq. Her claims about the size of beneficiaries of the interventions led by her ministry were doubted, as was the integrity of the social register.

However, NASSCO’s position on the social register, being aggregated through a collaboration between the ministries of budget and planning of the 36 states of the federation, should invite our curiosity and necessitate an independent re-verification exercise to confirm its reliability. While it’s impossible to have a fool-proof methodology in a country with no comprehensive database of all citizens, it can’t be difficult to establish the viability of NASSCO’s four-stage data-building exercise.

This process, according to information on their website, involves mapping and ranking local government areas based on the degree of poverty; ranking communities based on the availability of basic amenities and infrastructure; engaging members of the community to identify the most vulnerable individuals, and then adopting the gathered information to determine household income and eligible beneficiaries.

Of course, the governors, as the chief executive officers of their states, have legitimate reasons to question the integrity of the social register, either because of the privileged information at their disposal or the trust deficit that has trailed the social register. But the resources expended by the past administration to produce such database mean the government can’t afford to just discard it entirely, unless there’s a superior and faster process to come up with an alternative register. The country is too hungry and understandably impatient to wait for another register.

The authentication of a register is a practice with which most, if not all, the governors are familiar, having possibly inherited a bureaucracy saturated by ghost workers. The compromises in our civil service legitimise the governors’ concern and support the possibility of an untrustworthy social register. The ghost workers’ syndrome is a nightmare successive governors have endured, yet, as Governor Soludo said about the national social register, there’s a big question mark on the integrity of civil servants’ payroll in each state.

Soludo’s credentials extend beyond being a distinguished economist; he has also headed the nation’s apex bank, showcasing his competence in handling intricate data. Given his expertise in analysing complex information, he couldn’t have hastily endorsed the credibility of the social register. As a governor today, he owes his people the representational responsibility of ensuring that the Nigeria Living Standards Survey (NLSS), conducted by the esteemed National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), isn’t misapplied in his state.

Whatever we think of the push to discredit the national register, the governors still owe their people the burden of ensuring social interventions that don’t end up in the pockets of criminal ghosts. Ghosts are real. They are, as found in our civil service, dubiously-documented beneficiaries whose credit alerts end up in the bank accounts of the corrupt cartel tasked to manage the system, with an individual receiving the benefits of hundreds or even thousands of supposed beneficiaries. This is a reality to which every Nigerian isn’t a stranger, and so the call for a credible social register should only alarm those who have something to hide.

Everyone with a stake in the economic survival of Nigeria must invest in the sharing of President Bola Tinubu’s proposed $800 million World Bank loan and ensure that no dime goes to any ghost or the pocket of any governor. The federal government’s suspension of the promised cash transfers to vulnerable households, having weighed public opinion, is noble. But if it’s eventually implemented, the government must ensure that the social register adopted isn’t a book of ghosts.

The missing fact is, the governors can only be taken seriously if they unveil their individual plans for their states, because one of their reasons for the rejection of the social register is that each state’s problems are peculiar. Since their deliberations at the NEC on Thursday, July 20, where they proposed that state governments should implement cash transfer programmes based on state-generated social registers, instead of the previously-utilised national social register, to mitigate the inflationary impact of the end of the fuel subsidy regime, only Governors AbdulRahman AbdulRasaq and Dapo Abiodun of Kwara and Ogun states, respectively, have published their proposed intervention strategies. The people, unfortunately, would only find nobility in the governors’ anti-national social register activism if the details of the alternative measures they prefer are made public.

Since its inauguration last month, the Vice President Kashim Shettima-led National Economic Council has been tasked with pacifying a nation running out of patience, and, thankfully, the council members seem aware of this. The post-fuel subsidy realities of the country are sufficient motivation to develop practical solutions to the needs of the common man, and the NEC’s promise of electric and CNG-powered buses is a visionary intervention that must happen fast.