The Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr. Chris Ngige, yesterday reiterated the stance of the President Muhammadu Buhari’s government to create one million jobs through the approved N500 billion social intervention scheme.

Addressing newsmen in Abuja, Ngige maintained that 500,000 graduates from various disciplines will be trained and employed under the “Teaching Aid Corps” while over 300,000 school leavers and holders of First Leaving Certificates will be trained in various skills acquisition under the intervention scheme.

According to Ngige, the Federal Government will soon partner with the state government in a bid to revive 74 skill acquisition centres, Trade Test centres and Technical schools across the country.

Ngige said, “Under the intervention Programme for the social intervention policy of the government for which we have budgeted N500 billion, nobody has gone to that area of fund. So that N500 billion is intact.

“Operation Teach Nigeria is like Teaching Aid Corps, where 500,000 graduates in various disciplines will be taken in from the army of unemployed graduates and trained to become teachers.

“The next programme that will touch big volume is the skill acquisition or general education skill training, which conservatively will take about 300,000 persons. We initially wanted to take 370,000 persons but the initial target is that within the first 6 months, we will do 300,000.

“These people are not graduates; these people are just people who left schools. Some of them have school certificates o’ level, some of them have First Leaving Certificates but they will be trained using their hands in various vocational trainings.

“If we have 300,000 in one year, 300,000 in the second year and 300,000 in the third year, we are having about 1 million persons. We will have more than enough because of our population and the quantum of people we have in the unemployment market.”