The Niger Delta Presidential Amnesty Program was set up in 2010 by former president Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua GCFR. The sole purpose of the programme was to help rehabilitate and reintegrate militants in the Niger Delta who had accepted presidential amnesty given to them. It was on June 25, 2009 that President Yar’Adua proclaimed a 60-day unconditional amnesty period for these militants with the terms of willingness and readiness to surrender their arms, unconditionally renounce militancy and sign an undertaken to this effect.
This whole process went as planned, with a success rate of over 80%. The programme recorded great success, with over 17,000 persons rehabilitated. From vocational training to post graduate scholarships to even training of pilots; the programme successfully transformed these repentant militants to qualified, confident pluses to the society but “Ex-agitators from Ndokwa nation were completely excluded in the integration of ex-militants into the first, second and third phases of the amnesty programme by the immediate past leadership of the programme.”
On assumption of office by Senator Peter Nwaoboshi as Chairman, Senate Committee on Niger Delta/NDDC he assured the Ex-militants from Ndokwa extraction that they would be carried along in the programme with his emergence as Senate Committee Chairman.
Just yesterday, the Senate Committee on Niger Delta/NDDC led by the ebulient and erudite Senator Peter Nwaoboshi kicked off an OPEN INVESTIGATIVE HEARING ON ACTIVITIES OF THE PRESIDENTIAL AMNESTY PROGRAMME (PAP) at the National Assembly complex Abuja, with well meaning youths/ex-militants from Ndokwa extraction in attendance and were given the opportunity to present their long suffering from humiliation and neglect by Federal Government of Nigeria and Oil Companies present in their region as oil producing communities.
The investagive hearing was well attended by the Senate President Bukola Saraki, Senators, S.A. to the President and Coordinator of Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) and his members of staff were all seated at the National Assembly.
The committee promised to give a fair recommendation to the plight of the Ex-Militants from Ndokwa extraction. Thanks to our result-orientiated Senator Peter Nwaoboshi for continously proving his destructive critics wrong and bringing the Ndokwa Ex-militants back to the scheme of things in the Amnesty Programme.
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