nikki's Blog

John Dada , of Fantsuam Foundation , Nigeria was recently asked to contribute to a Pension watch blog. Below is his contribution. In May 2012, the Governor of Ekiti State flagged off the second batch of elderly citizens who receive a monthly stipend, bringing the total to 20,000 ( http://ekitistate.gov.ng/2012/04/fayemis-care-for-the-aged-in-ekiti-2/ ). Each of the elderly citizens are entitled to N5000 (about US$33.00) every month. The State Commissioner for Labour, Productivity and Human Capital Development, said observed that many states of the Federation are already approaching his ministry to learn and adopt the scheme. The Ekiti State Social Security for the...

Attachab featured heavily at this week’s UK-Nigeria online Skype meeting. Following the successful fund raising by FastTractor John Dada of Fantsuam Foundation gave us the following quick update: “We have the tractor driver, Linus Kallat and his assistant is Thomas. Thomas already works at Attachab and will double up as assistant” Unfortunately, and as was reported at the previous week’s meeting, the heavy rains have delayed the full utilisation of the tractor. John went on to inform us: “The French embassy funding has come to an end. However, It did it cover everything that was planned and there is still...

The week’s UK-Nigeria meeting took the form of a typed discussion between John Dada and Pamela McLean. Organisational transparency was the theme of the day and centered around the story of the Fast Tractor acquisition plus future plans for the Attachab site. John told us: “The Tractor Committee has employed a full-time driver.... and he has an assistant. The driver is well-known among the communities, so he will also double up as marketing person, while Osbert - a member of the Tractor team - will handle the payments etc.” Photos play an important part in telling the Fantsuam Foundation story...

Great excitement today as John confirmed during our online UK-Nigeria online meeting that the Fast Tracto r has indeed arrived safely at Fantsuam ....and it is blue! This is a photo of the actual tractor which John sent us after the meeting to see more please see our Flickr .

This week’s UK-Nigeria online meeting was unusual as we did not have the Nigerian input! The reason for this was that John Dada had emailed us to say that he had been visiting Jos hospital and had felt the blast when the bomb detonated. He was therefore busy making arrangements for the patient he was visiting to be moved. Despite this John was able update us via emails. The Fast Tractor story has now reached an exciting stage. Pamela Mclean was able to confirm that she had met with businessman Cass Biriyok at his offices in Canary Wharf and who...