Presidency approves verification of 30,000 PAP beneficiaries in N’ Delta

From Femi Folaranmi, Yenagoa

President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the decision of the Presidential Amnesty Office under the Interim Administrator, Col. Milland Dixion Dikio to conduct a verification exercise on the 30,000 ex-agitators captured under the programme in the last eleven years.

Consequently Dikio has set up a 10-man committee of President Amnesty Programme (PAP) Think-Thnak” with a mandate to enrich, monitor and propagate the new PAP roadmap of the Amnesty office to reposition and ensure that the new policies are close to the Niger Delta communities.

A member of the Strategic Committee of PAP, Mr Tonye Bobo, disclosed this in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State capital explained that the verification exercise is not a witch hunt exercise but a strategic way to verifying those that are capture and those still left out of the Amnesty programme

Bobo who confirmed the development when peaking with members of the Federated Correspondent Chapel of the NUJ, Bayelsa State Council said the verification exercise has also received the backing of all the ex-militant leaders in the region.

”it is said that the Amnesty office does not have the capacity to admit new beneficiaries and we agreed with him. Now we also agreed that who are these 30,000 beneficiaries? For us to know, we have to conduct the verification exercise,” he said.

Bobo assured that as a member of the new “Think-Thank” of the Amnesty office, ”the committee will engage every critical stakeholder from the grassroots to the top to offer advice or solution for the affairs of the region.”

Bobo ,who is also an amnesty beneficiary under the Third Phase, said the new committee set up by Dikio is also saddled with the responsibility of sustaining the prevailing peace in the region, adding that the issue of the PAP has to do with the re-integration of 30,000 ex-agitator captured and the development in the region.

“As one of the change-agents of the PAP, I am ready to bring to fore ideas that would help to achieve the desire and anticipated transformation in the region. We commend the Interim Administrator, Col. Milland Dixion Dikio for the new assignment”