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From Tony John, Port Harcourt
No fewer than 1,0000 former agitators across the Niger Delta region will benefit from the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) single digit interest loan.
The Chairman of the Board of Trustees (BOT) of the Presidential Amnesty Programme Beneficiaries Cooperative Limited (PAPCOSOL), Justice Francis Fedude Tabai (retd), made this disclosure in a statement in Abuja.
He said so far, over 2,000 former agitators have registered in the ongoing process at the various state offices of PAP, out of which 500 have been confirmed and cleared, and would receive the loan within the next two weeks.
The retired jurist and foremost traditional ruler in the Niger Delta said the team managing the process has done a holistic job of ensuring the loans are obtained by those who truly deserved them. He explained that the first set of beneficiaries was selected after a rigorous process which included physical verification of their business premises.
“We have received over 1,000 applications since we started a few weeks ago. The process is still ongoing at the various state offices of the PAP. However, as of now, we have painstakingly gone through the applications, beginning with the verification from PAP that those who applied are real delegates (former agitators) of the programme. We have also done field assessment by visiting the business premises of the prospective beneficiaries to ascertain for ourselves.
“Having done all of that, we will issue an offer letter to those who were successful in this first batch and once they accept the offer letter the loan sum that they applied for will be released to them within two weeks,” he said.
Justice Tabai also disclosed that in a bid to ensure sustainability, they have approached development partners to help in financing the scheme as the PAP alone cannot fund it, noting that when such collaboration is formed, more ex-agitators will have access to the loans.
He dismissed insinuations by naysayers of mismanagement of the loan, insisting that the scheme is managed by people of proven integrity and warned against the serial attempt to bring the well thought out initiative into disrepute.
“PAPCOSOL is a novel sustainable development initiative of the Interim Administrator of the PAP, Major-General Barry Ndiomu (retd) that is aimed at helping ex-agitators to seek alternative and sustainable sources of livelihood.
“Part of what we have tried to do is also to use the scheme to create some kind of data to know among the ex-agitators, their skill set, those who can rightly fit into entrepreneurship, and so on. This will help us facilitate linkages. But in the long run we want to see how we can begin to invest in areas where we have competitive and comparative advantage.
“We urge our people to join this effort to change the narrative of our region rather than the falsehood being peddled in the media by some people who are desperate to frustrate the entire process.”
