Speaking on Sunday during a town hall event by Channels Television, Atiku said there is a major defect in the design and implementation of the programme.
The TraderMoni, MarketMoni initiative of the Federal Government has been criticized by the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar.
Speaking on Sunday during a town hall event by Channels Television, Atiku said there is a major defect in the design and implementation of the programme.
He derided a situation where the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo or the Miniter of Humanitarian Affairs, Hajia Sayiya Umar Farouq went about distributing physical cash in marketplaces.
The former Vice President submitted that the programme has been hijacked and turned into a political campaign tool for a particular party.
He urged that institutions be created to manage such programmes instead of distributing money randomly.
“I think the defect in the system is not incorporating the system into an institutionalised process because what I understood TraderMoni and Market (Moni) with either the Vice President going around distributing money or the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs going round and distributing money.
“Why not create institutions that can actually attend to every sector of the economy as far as this MarketMoni or TraderMoni is concerned? As we said, we are going to vote N10bn to boost small and medium enterprises.
“We have a number of institutions where such funding can be channelled so that it is institutionalised, instead of personalising it and also using it for political purposes because currently, MarketMoni and TraderMoni have become political tools to promote political interests of a particular political party,” Atiku said.
The PDP candidate however ruled out the chances of scraping TraderMoni, MarketMoni and other social investment programmes of the current administration but promised to review them to make them more impactful on the grassroots.
According to him, “What I am saying is that they should be incorporated into an institution, so that it survives every government that comes in,” he said. “(The traders are not integrated) because there is no institution.
“If you have an institution to cater for that, the institution will be able to give everybody guidelines: ‘This is how to access these funds and this is how long it is going to take you to repair them and so on and so forth.’”
MarketMoni and TraderMoni are under the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) initiatives launched in 2017 and 2018, respectively and were created to boost the country’s economy through leverage and access to finance for petty traders.