By Laraba MUREY
The Minister for Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr. Betta Edu, has revealed that 8.3 million Nigerians are in dire need of humanitarian assistance in the North East.
She identified Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states as bearing the brunt of the crisis.
The minister made this known, weekend, in Abuja.
She lamented that these three northeastern states have been singled out as the hardest-hit regions among the 16 million Nigerians grappling with the humanitarian emergency.
“We have a huge task on our hands. As we speak now, over 16m Nigerians are affected by humanitarian crises either man-made or natural disaster with over 8.3m of them based in Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, and several States in the North Central; and others spread across the country.
“The UN said Benue had become the humanitarian need capital in Nigeria, and as such a lot of work needs to be done in the humanitarian angle,” she lamented.
The minister maintained that “one of the agendas of the Tinubu administration was to ensure that poverty is alleviated in Nigeria in line with the SDGs Goal One.
“The president is coming up with a very robust program to alleviate Nigerians from poverty.”
She stressed that poverty alleviation was now the new and important mandate of her ministry “as our work is to see how we can get those in poverty out of poverty and those at the verge of getting into poverty increase to social safety to protect them from falling into poverty.
“A lot of work is being put into the planning stage as we have finished the debriefing from the different Departments as well as the Agencies under us; we are working assiduously to finalize the plans.
“In a couple of weeks, we’ll be fully launching into this plans to help President Tinubu take out over 136m Nigerians out of poverty as implementation has started to help cushion the effect of the fuel subsidy removal.”
