July 4, 2018

Mr Ipoade Omilaju, ActionAid Nigeria Programme Manager on Humanitarian and Resilience, said on Wednesday that the organisation had spent about N40 million to stem youth restiveness in Kogi state.

Omilaju disclosed this in Osaka Igalamela-Odolu and Adavi Local Government Areas of the state while addressing newsmen at the inauguration of nine community-driven project interventions supported by ActionAid, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO).

According to him, this has to a large extent mitigated violent extremism among youths in nine communities in the state.

He said that one of the things the NGO knew about Kogi before its intervention programmes was youth restiveness and violence.

The youths, according to him, were being used as instruments of violent activities and the situation made the organisation to evolve a means of supporting them to be gainfully employed, so they will not have time for crisis.

He said the organisation discovered that the best way was to support them to process their produce in a way that could bring in more money for them.

“This way, it becomes impossible for those using money to entice them and use them as instruments of violence to get them.

“As a result of these interventions, to a large extent, the objective of the project has been achieved.

“About two months ago, Kogi was voted as the second most peaceful state in Nigeria, which has not been so in the last 10 years.

“Omilaju said some of the youths were trained to identify early warning signs of violence and what they could do to curb it and thereby check youth radicalism and violent extremism.

“We are actually looking at a scale-up of this project and you know that this project is being supported by Global Community Engagement Fund.

“It is an international funding organisation and there is already a plan for a second part of this project, which would enable us to extend it to other communities.

“This is in order to address the involvement of religious and traditional rulers in curbing youth restiveness and to a large extent, government involvement as well.”

He said that ActionAid had spent close to N40 million on the projects and was still spending more because as they spent, it was discovered that there were more to be done.

“There is a plan for sustenance. We do the selection of communities for intervention on the basis of the poorest of the poor and we get our statistics from National Bureau of Statistics (NBS),” he said.