From: Agaju Madugba, Katsina
The Secretary to Katsina State Government (SSG), Dr. Mustapha Mohammed Inuwa, has blamed the high level of poverty in the north to mass production of children by some parents who cannot adequately cater for them.
Inuwa spoke, on Thursday, at the opening ceremony of a workshop organised by the Federal Government to train participants who will take a census of the poor and the vulnerable in the state under the auspices of the National Social Safety Net Programme (NASSP).
According to him, the government had taken a number of measures to aimed at alleviating poverty in the area, including skills acquisition and other programmes for a reduction in the number of the unemployed but the beneficiaries sell starter packs and other equipment provided for take-off various small scale businesses.
As the he put it, “if you empower them with money, they look for another wife to marry. In my office alone, I have the case of four junior workers and four of them have a total of 52 children. I have four children.
“Honestly, we have to re-examine ourselves because when you say this, they say that you are not religious. There is nowhere in Islam where Muslims are encouraged to have battalion of children that you cannot feed or provide education for them.
“If government wants to provide houses for some of the people, what sense does it make where you give a two-bedroom flat to somebody who has 27 children.
“I know somebody who used his retirement benefits to marry a new wife and when he wants to meet his wife, they go outside or stay in the toilet because the house is overflowing with children.
“What is happening in Borno State has nothing to do with religion because we have a group of young people who are uneducated, illiterate and poor that people mobilize them against the society.
Earlier in his address, the NASSP National Coordinator, Peter Papka, explained that the registration of the poor and vulnerable persons across the country was designed to have authentic social registers in each state which will be put into the national social register.
He said that the participants at the training programme would be equipped with the necessary skills and tools to enable them interface with communities and identify the poor.
Papka said that the registration process would begin with an initial 12 pilot local government areas.