From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
Federal Government has promised to train and empower no fewer than 500 inmates from the Correctional Centres across the country with N500,000 each start-up grant as a way of rehabilitating them after serving various prison terms.
Senior Special Assistant to President Bola Tinubu on Technical, Vocational, and Entrepreneurship Education, Abiola Arogundade, at a press conference in Abuja, announced that the pilot edition had commenced at the Kuje Medium Correctional Centre.
The training would be in the areas of tailoring, shoemaking, poultry farming, computer appreciation, barbing, carpentry, liquid soap and disinfectants making, and laundry services, among others.
“We would like to train a minimum of 500 inmates. In Kuje, there are 723 of them, but we would like to train a minimum of 500. The reason it will not involve all of them is because we cannot compel them to be trained. It is something that they want to do, not something like a military approach.
“So, we talk to them, and give them questionnaires. I was reading some of the questionnaires administered to them and they were like, no, we don’t want to be trained. Those that do not want to be trained, we try to educate them in a little way on why the training is important.
“Some of them asked, if we are trained what shall we use it for? So, we announced to them that any single person trained under my office will get access to N500,000 to start up,” she announced.
Arogundade also spoke on the duration of the training, and why the focus is on the Correctional Centres.
“Some are nine months, some six months while some others are for one year; everything is there.
“Correctional Centres is just one of our interventions. It is not that we are focused on it, we have at least 15 that we are working on. So, it is just one of them and it is important that we don’t leave anybody behind. Those in Correctional Centres will come out and live with us, so we don’t want to leave anybody behind. That’s what the president stands for, to carry everybody along,” she explained.