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Buhari govt created 7m jobs in agriculture sector alone – Lai Mohammed

Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, yesterday dismissed assertions that the President Muhammadu Buhari led federal government has caused more job losses than any other past administration in the country.

According to him, the Buhari administration is fully committed to creating new jobs in all sectors of the economy.

He noted that government has added about seven millions of new jobs to the agriculture sector alone since the President took office in 2015.

Mohammed said this in Port Harcourt at the sixth graduation ceremony of 100 male and female entrepreneurs trained by the Empowerment Support Initiative (ESI) and the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC).

“Before this government came into power; the nation had 5 million rice growers but today 12.2 million rice growers have been added.

“That is an extra of more than 7 million jobs in the agric sector alone; and this was collaborated by the Chairman of the Rice Growers Association few days ago”, he said.


Dame Judith Amaechi, Founder and President of ESI, said beneficiaries were trained on plaster of Paris, plumbing, carpentry, floor tiling, electrical wiring and decoration.

She said the empowerment scheme was created to cushion skills-gap that stunted sustainable intra-personal growth in the nine states of the Niger Delta.

“We created our training platform in 2008 – which so far provided various training in vocational skills and entrepreneurial development for over 3,000 beneficiaries in Nigeria.

“ESI has aggressively engaged many children, women and youths on educational and vocational activities including capacity building both on national and international stage.

“We are focused to tackle endemic poverty head-on; develop a skill force that enables our citizens to be employable and self employed thereby reverse youth unemployment,” she said.

http://dailypost.ng/2018/02/04/buhari-g ... -mohammed/

“We have not produced any data on job creation, we produced data on people that were unemployed at the particular time and that is what we are sticking to.

“We don’t do politics at the NBS, the National Bureau of Statistics is the official source of data. Our law does not allow us to be countered. The law says very clearly that NBS is the official source of Nigerian data.

“Everybody else can have their opinion, they can do their own computations if they want to but when it comes to national data, the authoritative source, the custodian of all data is the NBS.

“So we don’t comment on what other people even ministers say as far as data is concerned. Our data is for evidence based policy and decision making and that is what we do.”