Moving on with TraderMoni

The last 4 months really brought TraderMoni up close and personal to Nigerians at home, and even those abroad. This was because the main opposition party went to great lengths to describe the scheme as vote buying, alleging that the Vice President himself was doling out the said funds to the market women.

Now that the elections are almost over, the new rumours they are pushing around is that Prof. Osinbajo has suspended the scheme.

When stories like these start to make the rounds, one is initially tempted to just ignore, rather than help the ignorant drive up their traffic. However, when notable institutions like Punch Newspapers in the name of driving traffic to their site, decide to publish a story with such falsehoods and other absurdities, it becomes pertinent to exhume the truth for the people to see.

The notion that our media houses got fat on *brown envelope* journalism is well documented and as such, most of them don't really like the Buhari-Osinbajo stance of not "sharing the money".

Why that would now leave such deep-rooted institutions as Punch Newspapers and Thisday Newspapers to continually churn out stories with the aim of misleading the populace and smearing the person of the vice president is quite unreasonable and alarming.

Seeing as TraderMoni as a scheme was passed along side with its siblings MarketMoni and Anchor Borrowers Scheme, all were approved by the National assembly before their commencement, it will take more than the whims of the Vice President to actually suspend or stop the program.

What a lot of persons fail to realise is that the VP during his TraderMoni tours which seemed to coincide with the campaign season was only performing his duties as supervising minister to ensure that all federal government policies were being carried out as appropriate.

This is similar to the task he was again saddled with after the FEC meeting on the 20th of March 2019, to audit all policies enacted in the last 8 years and give a status report so that the federal government will know how to adequately move forward in the next dispensation.

So for final clarification purposes, TraderMoni which has never been suspended at any time since its inauguration, was approved by the 8th general assembly. It is fully handled by the Bank of Industry, and has since recorded 30000 new beneficiaries after the 2019 presidential elections.

The roles and powers of the vice president with respect to the scheme are only supervisory to ensure total compliance to the policies as stipulated and implemented by the federal government.