The Presidential Amnesty Programme yesterday warned Niger Delta youths offered scholarship to study in universities not to take the gesture as a right, but as a rare privilege to enable them acquire tertiary education and better their lives.
A statement by Murphy Ganagana, the Special Assistant on Media to the programme’s coordinator, Prof. Charles Dokubo, said the warning was in view of an unruly behaviour exhibited last week by some non-beneficiaries of the pprogramme at the Gregory University, Uturu, Abia State.
According to him, being from Niger Delta is not an automatic qualification to enjoy the benefits of the pprogramme as its mandate mainly covers the management of 30, 000 persons captured in the database of beneficiaries.
He said reports on the cause of the incident indicated that the students were being mischievous by demanding to be granted same allowances meant for beneficiaries of the programme on scholarship duly captured in the database.
Ganagana stated: “A committee set up to ascertain the number of beneficiaries of the Amnesty Programme hitherto deployed to universities onshore for various educational programmes discovered that an alarming figure of students enrolled in universities under the Amnesty Programme were not captured in the database at the Amnesty Office. This was against the backdrop of huge tuition fees forwarded to the Amnesty Office for payment by some universities in the country for supposed beneficiaries deployed in the institutions for study.
“It is therefore uncharitable and irresponsible for Niger Delta youths who are not duly captured in the database of the Amnesty Programme but offered conditional scholarship on compassionate grounds to demand full privileges accorded genuine beneficiaries of the Programme.”
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