An ongoing probe, ordered by the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, has uncovered a massive fraud in the YouWin programme, a Federal Government Youth Enterprise With Innovation grant programme by the Goodluck Jonathan administration.
According to The PUNCH, investigators have discovered that some senior civil servants gave out or facilitated slots worth between N7m and N10m each to their spouses, children and friends who would not have qualified for the grants if they were not aided by their “connections” within and outside the ministry.
Quoting an unnamed source, it was discovered that the initial findings were so worrisome that the Minister had decided that the entire programme should be restructured.
“The fraud uncovered in the programme made the minister to restructure the programme and turn its focus into enterprise education,” the source added.
The source did not, however, state whether any of the country’s anti-graft agencies had joined the investigators whom our correspondent was made to understand were ministry of finance officials.
The source in the finance ministry stated, “Actually, allegations were persistent that there was racketeering. Some of the applicants, especially those who lost out, claimed that some of the winners simply copied and pasted the plans of other applicants in order to win.
“Some of them also said they were asked by some civil servants to use specific consultants in order to be considered.
“Contrary to the rules of the game, awards were also given to some entrepreneurs that were operating outside Nigeria. In fact, some of these people simply took the cash and migrated to foreign countries.”
The source added that the investigators found out that the ministry under Jonathan awarded a “disproportionate” number of awards to people from a particular part of the country.
The source said, “Some of the members of the team used it to set up friends and family as awardees. In one case, a husband and his wife used the same address and pocketed N10m each. In another instance, a son of one of the directors in the ministry was given N10m.
“When the (current) administration got into power, one of the first things that the ministry did was to ask for the BVN of awardees. It was an attempt to find out if some of the awardees got more than a single slot and whether senior civil servants awarded slots to their family members.”
It was learnt that the BVN verification, which exposed the fraud in the programme and initiated the probe, might lead to the indictment of some senior civil servants.
