Interim administrator of Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) Maj-Gen Barry Ndiomu (rtd) has disclosed that the payment of stipend to ex-agitators is filled with fraudulent practices thereby inflating the figure gulping over a trillion naira.
He disclosed this during a meeting with traditional rulers under the auspices of the Association of Niger Delta Monarchs (ANDM) in Port Harcourt Rivers State.
He said despite the challenges facing PAP, the programme had recorded tremendous successes in education and skill acquisition.
He identified the accuracy of PAP’s database as one of the challenges facing the programme.
Ndiomu said the scheme has produced 121 first class graduates from 2015 to 2022 during the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, adding that 2,984 amnesty students were currently in various higher institutions undergoing their studies on scholarship.
In a statement by the special assistant media, Thomas Peretu to the interim administrator, Ndiomu he said over a trillion naira has been spent on the programme.
He recalled that during the disarmament and demobilisation stage, 30,000 ex-agitators were captured, wondering why the number still remained the same many years after.
He said, “Now when I took over office, they still had the 30,000 intact, based on our records. But you will agree with me that that is not realistic, what that means is that nobody died, nobody graduated from the university and got gainfully employment and so I decided to investigate.
“I’m sure our royal majesty and highnesses must have read in the papers some reactions by some of our people, at the end of the day, they call you all sorts of names, but what I am doing is in their best interest.
“In my investigations, now there are two categories of what we call stipend payments of the ex-agitators, you have the bulk payment and you have the single individual payments too, that is supposed to be to individual ex-agitators.
“In the course of our investigations, the bulk payment was explained to me, as monies paid in bulk to some of the ex-militant leaders and the basis for that is because there were a number of ex-agitators in the list, that were not accounted for during the disarmament and demobilisation phases, and so there was a need for all payments to be made to the ex-militant leaders who will in turn disburse same to those affected.
“But strangely in the course of investigating, if we could justify that of the bulk payment programme of the ex-militant leaders, we now found individuals with single BVN having multiple payments into their accounts with a single BVN, so which means a single BVN receiving 33 stipend payments of N65,000 monthly. We want to understand exactly why an individual had 33 stipend payments into his account,” he said.
