Amnesty Students Protest Controversial 1,714 Scholarship Slots

A fresh crisis is brewing in the Niger Delta region as the Association of Presidential Amnesty Students Worldwide (APASW) move to join a planned peaceful protest over alleged shoddy deals in the award of 1,714 local and foreign scholarship slots by the immediate past administration of the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP).

Speaking with newsmen, the president of the association, Comrade Patrick Ipidei, called on the interim administrator to weed out officials in the education unit who may have perpetrated the alleged scholarship fraud, using likely ghost names in the place of ex-agitators to siphon large sums of money from the office.

He said the students will join the planned peaceful protest at the expiration of the two-weeks ultimatum given to the new interim administrator, Maj. Gen. Barry Tariye Ndiomu (rtd) to set up a probe panel to investigate the 1,714 local and foreign scholarship slots which excluded ex-agitators and weed out the bad eggs in the education unit to sanitise the education unit.

According to him, if the new interim administrator fails to set up the probe panel to investigate and publish the names of the scholarship beneficiaries, the student body will have no option than to proceed with the peaceful protest to demand for their rights as earlier announced by the president of Ijaw Defenders Mandate (IDM) Comrade John Gbozimor.

Ipidei who decried the high handedness of some former aides and staff in the education unit in the last administration, said the ex-agitators will not allow such high magnitude of fraud in the education unit of PAP to go unpublished.

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Gbozimor had over the weekend alleged that some aides of the immediate past interim administrator of PAP had shortchanged the names ex-agitators with other persons that were not part of the amnesty programme.

The group also called on the new  Ndiomu to immediately set up an audit panel to investigate the process that culminated in the award of the 1, 714 scholarship slots to determine the exact number of ex-agitators that benefitted from the scholarships, reiterating that the former administration of PAP had shortchanged ex-agitators in the scholarship scheme which according to IDM, was hurriedly put together.