AN ASSESSMENT OF PRESIDENT MUHAMMAD BUHARI’S SOCIAL INTERVENTION SCHEMES FROM 2016 – 2022

The aim of this study is to give a critical assessment of President Buhari’s administration Social intervention schemes and its effects on poverty and unemployment rate in Nigeria. Many commentators have commended the government of President Buhari for launching such an ambitious social intervention schemes for the poor and vulnerable people in Nigeria, while many have seen it as a colossal failure especially among opposition politicians. The opposition sees the intervention as mere political gymnastic that is conceive by the administration to patronize the electorates and not necessary to address concrete issue of poverty, unemployment, inequality and deprivations. Using mixed method, the study presented and analyze data from World Bank and National Bureau of Statistic and discover that the schemes did not significantly impacted the rate of poverty and employment during implementation. After about 7years of implementing the schemes, poverty rose to an all-time high of about 63% with number of poor people standing at 137million. On unemployment the study find out that over 40% of Nigerian youth were unemployed at the end of 2022. Though many factors and actors many have contributed but the study sees limited coverage of the National Social Register, poor institutional quality and lack of monitoring and evaluation as the challenges that mitigate the effective performance of the scheme. Therefore, to overcome these challenges the study made some recommendations.