Recently, you went to Mexico and understudied their CCT programme, what did you find out from them?
We went to Mexico to see how well their conditional cash transfer programme has performed and because the World Bank has stated that it has helped the country to work their poverty rate down by over 25 per cent. And so, if that was the case we thought that we should go and talk to the office that runs the programme to learn about it. And we discovered there is a lot of money that is put into it and they cover a very large number of families, up to 5 million families, I mean persons. So, ours is a young programme as you may know, we are still in pilot phase. The President launched the program in 2007. And we initially had four sates out of 36 states participating and now we have the balance of 24 states involved in the programme. So what we learnt from Mexico is that this is one of the programmes that a government that cares can be involved in. There are some citizens of a country that just basically are not able to be involved in mainstream activities, there could be millions of them. And a good way of reaching after them and making sure that they can participate ultimately in the economy is to initiate a programme like the conditional cash transfer in Nigeria, we call it COPE. And, it has two very crucial conditions. One is that you keep your family school age kids in school and the other is that you make sure your household takes advantage of freely available medical services and medical health care.
In our first stage, we are able to keep 30,000 kids in school that could have dropped out of school. So, our main lesson from Mexico is that this is truly a good programme but it also confirmed for us that our own approach may be even more useful for the society than the Mexico approach. Because in our approach you actually graduate off the programme in 12 months, whereas in their approach you need to stay in the programme almost interminably, creating a welfare state. For a poor country like ours imagine millions of Nigerians receiving free money every month. I mean that is really not the way we want to go, we want to see the President as helping the people but helping them to stand up on their own, and that is basically what we want to do. In our programme you receive the basic income guarantee every month in the seventh month of the training you receive a huge sum of money we call Poverty Reduction Accelerated Investment Money (PRAIM). So that you can invest in a business that can help you keep making some income every month to replace the one that government was given to you. Actually, they receive N84,000 which is quite significant having been paid for over twelve months receiving it on the seventh month, but that will help them basically, we think it is a very good programme.
The First Lady as you know is the mother of COPE, having also, been the person to give out the first cheque for the lump sum money when we got it done.

Apart from this programme, there is another programme, village solution what is it all about?
The thing is that we have to discuss all unsuccessful methods we have used to fight poverty in the past. If we use the right methods we would not have the kind of poverty level that we have today. So, the situation we have today is a clear reflection of the obviously wrong policies that we have in the past for fighting poverty. I think that you have to fight poverty, community by community, village by village. Everywhere you go in the world you will know right away where poor people are, just by looking at it. I don't care if its London, New York, where ever it is. When they take you to the poor neighbourhood you will know right away, Lagos, Abuja, where ever. So, that's what we need to transform. Sometimes, people get focused on young people, women, old people, whatever, but they are scattered all over the place. But we want to transform communities so that in the communities, they have a place to go where you get jobs, in the communities they have good schools, in the communities they have basic infrastructures, in the communities they have basic health care services. So, what we mean by village solution is the communities set up solutions for fighting poverty, but we believe that these solutions are anchored on particular activities and in this case we believe that our key anchor is in processing activities.

So, the heart of the Village Economic Development Solution Programme, which is called Village Solutions, in short, is an anchor processing activity, so it is in a village setting, to which are a length of feeder activities, so you may have a large number of groundnut farmers that bring their groundnuts to a processing place to make groundnut oil. We have a large number of cassava farmers that bring their cassava to a place to be processed into garri, flour, whatever. So, with the processing plant in tact, they assure jobs for the farmers, so the farmers now have a place to bring their produce. And they also create jobs for the people working in the processing plants and they create jobs for the people marketing the outputs of the processing plant. And they create jobs indirectly for people selling 'akara' or who own restaurants. Then before you know it you build a whole set of industries, it will help to have a reverse in the rural urban migration situation, people start to come back because they can get jobs, they can build their homes and you then have people that can come together and set up trust funds to take care of their schools, to set up their own basic health care services, to provide small scale infrastructures in their villages. We see that in Kebbi, where a tiny village you will never expect much from built a bridge. They got a small additional support from the World Bank but they built a bridge that can enable them get to the market during the rainy season. So this village solution is the set of solutions that villages can put their arms around to try to work in order to drive away poverty.

People say that keke NAPEP is seen all over the cities, in the urban areas. Not much of this activities is noticed in the rural communities. Why are your activities mostly urban centered?
Our attention is always drawn to where poverty is, it is true that the poverty situation in the rural areas is more pronounced. But the poverty situation in the urban areas at the end of the day can be more violent. If you are in the rural areas and you are poor, you can probably be hanging by going to the farm and going fishing and coming back. But if you are in the big city, in Lagos and Abuja, and you do not have money, you do not have the choice of the rural people so, as much as we pay attention to the rural areas, we also have to be sure that we pay attention to urban areas and some of the violent crimes are committed in the urban areas when people are unemployed and have nothing to do. So, the poor people in urban areas, their situation can be a little bit more serious than those in the rural areas. Now, with the keke NAPEP example, when we sell keke NAPEP to people we sell them to people living in both urban and rural areas. We don't sell to the urban drivellers alone. However, we testify that the drift to the urban areas obviously means that that's where they are making their money. You cannot force a person to operate their vehicle in a place where they are not making money. Then you are not helping them to come out of poverty. What we are doing is to provide the person with tools but we allow them to use their imagination to see how best they maximise their returns from the tools. So if we give a person in the FCT a keke NAPEP, it's up to them to decide if they want to use it in the outskirts of town or somewhere within town. I give you an even more clearer situation and that's where you provide somebody with keke NAPEP, say in Enugu but they take it to Lagos. Again I don't necessarily have a great problem with it, so far as they are able to make money and take it back to their family at Enugu. The manner I see it, some of us are in Abuja, and we are here because this is where we can make our living. So you can't constrain the keke NAPEP person to a particular locality.

The government talks about Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Are they part of what you are trying to achieve, bringing down the population of people living below the poverty line?
I think Nigeria has what it takes to challenge all our problems, the issue with Goal number one of the MDG is that it first depends on how your measure of poverty is. For example, in Nigeria today our measure in the 2004 Nigerian Living Standard Survey, is that if a person has expenditure of less than N65 a day, they are poor, that means if you have N65 a day on consumption you are not poor, but if you take that and try to say it outside, you better say it and run away quickly. So, that is an issue there, using that measure as we have used, I believe we have a poverty rate around 50 per cent today. But the problem we have is that we need to cause growth in the economy to be much stronger than it is. I will give you a concrete example, in 1999 we had a poverty rate of 70 per cent estimated. That gives you 75-76 million people in poverty. So, in 2004 we worked the poverty rate down to 54.4 per cent. The problem is that, it also gives you the population of close to 75 million people in poverty because the population is growing. So, you better work down the poverty rate much more faster than the population is growing, otherwise, you stay at a platform where you always have 75 million people in poverty, if you are not careful, the rate may be going down but the number of people in poverty may be going up. And that's what people see, people out there on the streets are not statisticians. They just see people in poverty, so when somebody like me goes to say, but the poverty rate is going down, people don't want to listen to it. Because they see many people around them that are poor, and they are correct. So, it is a challenge that we have, I believe that given our poverty definition and using extreme policies, we should be able to reduce by one-half the proportion or percentage of people that were in poverty in 1990/1992.

So, we can, is what we are saying, I am using the broader poverty definition. Am not even using extreme poverty definition because we didn't have an extreme poverty rate in 1990. We have an extreme poverty rate today, about 22 per cent. I keep telling people let us not worry about what the MDG wants us to do. We need to end poverty in Nigeria, we don't need the UN or anybody to tell us to meet some goal. Supposing they had said 2017, then we will be struggling for 2017, supposing it was 2029… it doesn't matter we need to be aggressive in speeding economic growth, creating jobs, so that we can reduce the poverty rate dramatically, even in 2010. So, that's what the thing is. It's good that UN has the MDGs, so people have something that they are trying to pursue. But we should not be prisoner of the goal, if we can end it next year, let us end it next year. The President has wealth creation as one of the Seven-Point Agenda, Human Capital Development. Lets commit to these goals, lets commit to the rule of law and good governance, so we can use our resources well. Lets build our critical infrastructural in the manner the President has anticipated. If we do that, we won't even be talking about whatever goals, that somebody sets. We will be talking about our own aspirations and what we can achieve.