14 August 2014, Abuja – Participants of the Youth and Gender Upliftment Development Agenda (You-GUDA) in Bauchi state have been counseled to see the programme as a catalyst for self-development. The State Governor, Malam Isa Yuguda, at the close of orientation and flag-off of implementation programme in Bauchi recently, urged the youth to exhibit high sense of responsibility in carrying out their assigned responsibilities.
He recalled that the state government has in the past six years empowered over 127,000 youth and women through various interventions which included educational placement and entrepreneurship programme. Others are Spiderweb security, sanitation duties, micro industry, empowerment SURE-P /Jembi pay phones, skills acquisition, agro-allied, and waste recycling entrepreneurship.
These, Yuguda said, were in addition to other programmes implemented through other government ministries and agencies including Ministries of Cooperatives and Poverty Alleviation, Women Affairs, Youth and Sports, and Agriculture.
The governor explained that the deliberate policy actions are geared to positively impact the lives of the youth in order to change their conditions from that of hopelessness to that of hope and bring attitude change in their mindset.
He said it was against this leverage that the state government scaled up interventions by engaging an additional 4,000 youth and women across the state under the Youth and Gender Upliftment Development Agenda (You-GUDA).
The governor said the programme You-GUDA would engage youth in various community services such as health, education, security, sanitation, and environment, and each would receive a monthly allowance of N10, 000.
According to him, the programme has given special attention to women and the physically-challenged, stressing that the success of youth and women empowerment is unprecedented in the Northeast sub-region.
Meanwhile, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Senator Bala Muhammed, has secured the freedom of 53 inmates serving various jail terms in the Bauchi state prison and assisted them with the sum of N10,000 each.
Represented by his aide and chairman of the Non-Governmental Organisation ‘Kaura Community Elders Initiative’, Alhaji Musa Galadiman Gora, the minister explained that the gesture was meant to bring succour to the prisoners and decongest the prison.
He disclosed that the beneficiaries were those with minor cases who were jailed as a result of their inability to pay fines charged on them, adding that the sum of N1.7 million has been disbursed to settle the fines which led to the release of the detainees.
“The FCT Minister Senator Bala Muhammed out of his sympathy to the inmates has dished out the sum of N1.7 million to pay the fine charges of the prisoners and as well as assisted each of them with the token amount of N10,000 to help them start petty businesses after they go out of the jail’’, he said.
Responding, the comptroller of the Nigeria Prison Service in the state, Alhaji Sidi Muhammad, who revealed that the prison has a capacity for 500 inmates but accommodates about 815 inmates, hailed the minister for the gesture, appealing to him to extend it to other prisons across the state even as he asked other top government and political officials to follow suit. This is as just he also admonished the released detainees to desist from acts that could bring them back to the prison, but to engage in useful ventures that would make them to be responsible members of the society who could be called upon for national development.
– This Day