Date: 2017-03-04

Mrs Aminat Yahya, the Director, Conditional Cash Transfer Scheme in Kwara , said failure of the biometric machine stalled the payment of the Federal Government's N5,000 stipends beneficiaries in Kwara.

Yahya told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Ilorin on Friday, that the exercise ran into a hitch in Isin and Oke-Ero Local Government Areas of the state#, adding that the machine went bad when it was being used to pay farmers in the two areas.

She also said that thumb prints of farmers were not captured easily in the biometric data due to the nature of their occupation.

"Farmers' thumbs, especially in Isin and Oke-Ero and some other areas, too, could not be thoroughly captured. "The development is posing serious challenge to the success of the capturing exercise.

"For now, we can't pay some and leave others out. We won’t be achieving uniformity in that sense," she said.

She further said that bank officials had returned to the affected communities to recapture those whose fingerprints and passport photographs did not appear boldly in the data bank.

Yahya assured the beneficiaries that payment would begin after they had been grouped into various cooperatives for rotational savings and the problem rectified.

"We have a monitoring team and facilitators saddled with the responsibility of ensuring that the funds acquired by beneficiaries are invested in businesses they identified." NAN reports that Conditional Cash Transfer Scheme is meant to uplift the poor in the country.NAN