I have not seen any sincerity in amnesty probe -ex-militant leader, Muturu

By Timi Black, WARRI

A former agitator and Delta state chairman of phase 2 of the amnesty programme, Mr. Kingsley Muturu, has expressed dissatisfaction over the management of the Presidential Amnesty Programme, (PAP) by sucessive leadership of the programme which was according to him designed to impact positively on the lives of ex-agitators in Niger Delta.

The ex-agitator disclosed this in a statement signed by himself and was made available to newsmen in his Bomadi country home on Tuesday.

Muturu lamented that certain number of persons who should have benefited from the programme had been left unattended, for over 10 years running, due to some deceitful manipulations.

He explained that the programme had, between the period of 2012 and 2015, trained artisans for a number of months and the beneficiaries provided starter-packs on graduation, but suffered setbacks under successive leaders who do not mean well for Niger Delta region.

The militant leader stated: “I am pained as a leader of ex-agitators when seeing manipulations in the amnesty office, to the extent that beneficiaries since 2009 have not gone for training or to school till date.

“I want the PAP leadership to respond to some salient issues: Is it proper to call beneficiaries to Lagos or elsewhere, lodge them in hotels for three days and give them peanuts as packages without any training?

“PAP Phase 2 has 6,166 (six thousand, one hundred and sixty-six) beneficiaries, except few, majority of them have not gone for training from those Camps.Trainings such as hair-dressing and others that supposed to last for one year are now zero down to three days. Training allowances that ought to be 3,000,000 now #500.000 or #700.000. What they call training is not actually a training, there is no training programme that is actually design for three days or meant for an hotel room.

“I disagree with Colonel Dixion Dikio (rtd) where he said out the 30,000 beneficiaries of PAP, 22,000 have been trained. We want him to publish names of trained beneficiaries and the camps they belong. Let him also publish the eight thousand untrained beneficiaries and the camps they belong. He should also publish the number of impacted community slots.”

Muturu who also spoke on the Kaiama looting said: “we want the PAP office to tell us their findings on the looting of the warehouse equipments meant for training of beneficiaries at Kaiama. I personally believe the PAP office is in a better position to tell us what transpired because the looting was apparently orchestrated.

“It is annoying that, the relationship between the PAP office and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) was so cordial that no investigation has been carried out on this looting till date.”

The ex- agitator, however, called on the federal government to investigate the PAP, saying many of the programme managers have since derailed.