The Chairman of TIN, Awwal Rafsanjani, said on Channels Television’s Lunch Time Politics that the initiative “is an official use of public funds in the name of TraderMoni to actually induce voters”.
He explained that his claim was based on the fact that the scheme was nota programme that was “part and parcel of the manifesto of the ruling party”.
According to him, the scheme, which is not a part of the constitution would have been looked at differently if had started three years ago, noting that running the exercise so close to the elections, raises all the wrong flags.
“The allegation by many Nigerians that this is clearly a case of vote buying using public funds to do that, and it goes contrary to our constitution and to having a free and fair election,” Channels Television report quoted Rafsanjani as saying.
He noted that the TraderMoni scheme goes contrary to President Muhammadu Buhari’s statement in which he said no public fund would be used for his re-election.
The Nigerian Government has argued that the scheme is an empowerment initiative designed to meet the financing needs of at least 2 million petty traders across the country.
But Mr. Rafsanjani said that if the government had TraderMoni as a policy plan, they should have begun its implementation before the elections.
He said no matter what the intention is, running TraderMoni few weeks to the election will give different signals to Nigerians across the federation, adding that if the government was sincere about the scheme, they would have started before the elections drew this close.
Rafsanjani said mixing election campaign with “this distribution of money” is not a good move and that the government was ill-advised on the TraderMoni initiative.
He said even the opposition will capitalise on the scheme as an excuse for protest and that clearly for him, “TraderMoni is vote buying”.
Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo had in his latest open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari on Sunday, criticized the tradermoni scheme and blasted the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo for engaging in such project and touring markets to distribute government money.
But officials of the ruling the All Progressive Congress (APC) said that the party would not bow to pressure by the opposition to stop the TraderMoni programme of the Federal Government, insisting that the initiative has bettered the lives of the masses.
According to the officials, the TraderMoni scheme is a federal government initiative aimed at providing two million petty traders across the country with collateral-free loans.