The Federal Government has insisted that successful applicants for the 774,000 jobs under the Special Public Works Programme must have a Bank Verification Number (BVN) to be paid their wages.

Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo (SAN), made this known on Thursday in Abuja, during a press conference jointly addressed alongside the Director General of the National Directorate of Employment (NDE), Nasir Ladan.

According to Keyamo, the resort to BVN would help entrench transparency and avoid double payments to applicants during the implementation of the programme, which was designed to employ 1,000 persons from each of the 774 Local Government Areas of the country.

His words: “Mr. President has given a clear directive for this programme to be totally free of fraud. Everybody will be paid by a bank account and BVN. You must not only have a bank account, you must have a BVN so you cannot be paid twice.

“You can’t open an account under two different names. Everybody’s biometrics will be taken by the banks to ensure that you don’t have two different accounts.

Within the next few weeks we will do that. “We are going to conclude with the banks in the next few days to ensure that we are transparent and the banks will tell Nigerians exactly how they want to go about this in all the local governments in the country.”

Keyamo, who further disclosed there would be implementation committees at different levels to ensure proper documentation of those selected, said the committees would select and supervise the projects to be done in the various local governments.

“In other words, we don’t just want to give people money and sit down here in Abuja and assume that those community services are going on everywhere. We don’t want to assume that.

“We are going to have actual people on the ground; implementation committee supervising this work. Over the next fear days, the DG and myself will put our heads together and announce these committees across the country,” the minister stated. (Text, excluding headline, courtesy New Telegraph)

• Festus Keyamo (SAN)