The Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) said it has paid for the full scholarship and tuition and In-Training-Allowance (ITA) of 3,000 students from the Niger Delta region within Nigeria and abroad for the 2022/2023 academic session. 

Freston Akpor, the SA to the Interim Administrator of PAP, Maj Gen. Barry Ndiomu (Rtd) said in a statement.

Akpor described as mischievous, uncharitable and ungodly the insinuations that the current dispensation is yet to deploy delegates under the scholarship programme.

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He also reiterated efforts by the PAP to launch the Formal Education Trust Fund to boost the formal education scheme of the PAP.

Akpor said that instead of cancelling the inconclusive scholarship awarded by his predecessor and initiating a fresh one as most persons would have done, Gen. Ndiomu has rather sanitised and adopted the process with payment of all fees of 1,700 PAP students spread across tertiary institutions of learning across the country and an additional 55 delegates going into their first year in various universities in different countries.

He urged the public to ignore the claims of mischief makers, maintaining that despite a surfeit of misinformation against Ndiomu, who assumed office on September 19 last year, he has sanitiesed the Programme despite inheriting several liabilities ranging from unpaid scholarship awards, uncompleted vocational training centres, non-formal education programmes and a huge financial burden to contend with.

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“The PAP which has been watching with strong indignation the unsubstantiated statements attributed to some mischief makers hiding under pseudonyms, would have ordinarily not joined issues with faceless persons as such an exercise would only elevate the enterprise of those bad hats. 

“However, the PAP needs to put the records straight to prevent stakeholders and the public from being exposed to and consuming the toxic narrative in the media space,” he said.

He explained that since Ndiomu came on board, he has strategically cleared all inherited debts through tactical financial models, some of the debts which included those that were owed to critical contractors and agencies, as well as scholarship debts.

THIS DAY