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There are strong indications that the federal government and several states including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) are about to clash on policy differences bordering on the planned introduction of MarketMoni Scheme announced by the Vice President Yemi Osinbajo in Edo State last week.

It would be recalled that Osibanjo, while in Edo last week, announced the introduction of a new empowerment scheme for hawkers and roadside traders which had been originally banned in many state of the federation because of their associated nuisance on traffic spots and busy streets.

The collusion course is coming from the fact that the federal government is introducing a scheme for businesses that had been banned across the state without recourse to states.

According to Osinbajo, “We have the conditional cash transfer which is giving N5,000 a month to some of the poorest Nigerians across the country”. In the next few weeks we are starting a Micro Credit Scheme which we call TraderMoni that is a different scheme from MarketMoni, the trader money is for smaller traders including the hawkers, street traders and roadside traders”.

In an interview monitored on Channels TV in Lagos, an Abuja based legal practitioner and lead partner of Sustainable Entrepreneurship & Economic Development Initiative (SEEDI), Mr. Celestine Okeke said “Talking about road side trading, there is a big confusion”.

“There is a ban on it. In Lagos, they have Kick Against Indiscipline (KAI) and in Abuja we have Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB) that gets over 200 million per Annum from enforcement activities on street trading and hawking you see them daily picking street traders and hawkers off the streets and for a guy who wants to roast corn or hawk bread on the road side, he wouldn’t be doing that in the remote villages, he needs to come out to where there is a bit commercial activities like the bus stops where most of us are supposed to be standing there, so, I am standing by a woman who is roasting corn and how convenient that is.

“Why the government wants to put this money at the hands of the people who are at the bottom of this pyramid is to grow the businesses of Nigerians at the base of the ladder.

It is a credit because the vice president said that they would pay back and once they pay back, we would give them some more money as well.

Okeke averred that “there is a big difference between micro credit and micro finance.

Micro credit is when you give N5,000 to N10,000 little money, but then you also have a need to document these street hawkers”.

He queried the process for reaching them and I will tell you something also, and if they do have BVN.

“I will tell you something also we keep looking as finance as the only challenge micro businesses have. Most times it is not financed; a good number of them are doing it out of their survival in instincts, they need to survive, they have not learnt the fundamentals for running that. So, you get someone that is roasting corn in the street, you give him or her N5,000 or N10,000 to grow the business.

“Have you even interacted with the person to know if the person needs more funding or the person is just doing this because he has a challenge and just needs small money to leave his or her situation?

“With that five thousand, will you say that if we give you N10,000 can you move from roasting corn to doing better in a different place. We need to get all of these so that when we give them this money, we are sure of what they would use the money for.

“Because the idea is this, if you throw in maybe a N100m into trader money and 50% of it is lost, it won’t have benefitted the economy, but if we have had this interaction with them and say that let us even get these persons to rather making roasted corn by the road side, pull into the number of persons who produce corn for other purposes.

“So I am just saying that we need to do more before we start giving out this money, because even for GEEP, there are already instances where some people tell you that look; I am a genuine trader, I didn’t get GEEP but that woman that stays by my side, she is not a trader but she knows one position and she got a money from GEEP.

“So we need to make the processes open, transparent and accountable so that people who are the hawkers you want to help can really understand you to achieve what you want them to achieve.   So in the FCT, the locals produce what they call ‘okpa’ the bean cake kind of food, we need them to be formalized.

“They should get a union, we identify the union, we check who has BVN among them, check those who still want to continue in that trade, those who have thought of a different trade they want to do.

“OK, do we just take a hundred of you and maybe give you N30,000 each that is against taking five hundred of you and give you maybe N10,000 each, because if you put money in the hands of an entrepreneur that is not prepared, that money becomes the money they use for consumption financing which is simply to either change phone, buy a new cloth or add up to school fees or repair a generator.

Okeke therefore called for interaction between the federal government and the target population for the TraderMoni so as to structure the administration of the fund and better guide and track beneficiaries’.

He said this is important as it will be better to identify “what sector are we targeting, what are their numbers, do they have a union, do they have a head, can we bring them into a place, give them some non-financial services first before we start looking at the financial services”.