21st June, 2018
The Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) is currently training 200 beneficiaries in skills acquisition in Ondo State to boost the process of reintegration of ex-agitators in the Niger Delta region.
The Coordinator, PAP, Prof. Charles Dokubo made this known in a statement on Thursday in Abuja.
Dokubo said that the training would enhance their employment by the firm that is training the participants, hence making them economically helpful to the society.
“Vocational centres have been set up in states across the Niger Delta to train them to become self-reliant and contribute to the development of the country.
“We are training them with expert trainers, dealing diligently with the work they’d like to do.
“It is mostly about reintegration. You train people and retrain people. They must also be part of the society, the wider society that they were not part of.
“So, we are trying to reintegrate them. We train them; we also give them jobs and make sure that they earn their own and not depend on the stipend of the amnesty programme.
“We have a lot of training programmes now; we have a training programme in Ondo and other parts of the country.
“But that of Ondo is the most spectacular in the sense that we are training about 200 people and they will not just be trained, but they are going to be employed by the firm that is training them,” he said.
According to him, it is an exciting example of reintegration, because it is not only to train them, but it empowers them to work, earn a living and pay taxes.
He also noted that the programme was at the critical stage of reintegration of ex-agitators into the society.
He further said that “the training is taking part of the work now because some people have been trained for a very long time now and they have lost the knowledge of what they have studied.
“So what we are trying to do is to retrain them again before they are given hands on whatever they want to do.
“We are also thinking of setting up clusters so that when you train them and they don’t have a job, they can also fend for themselves in the business clusters,” he said.
He stressed that proper training and retraining of beneficiaries of the programme was vital for their smooth reintegration into the society.
“If we cannot train them, we cannot reintegrate them, if you cannot give them assistance in setting up things, they will always be dependent on the amnesty Office.
“We want them to be cast out of the armpit of the amnesty office and have a firm hold in whatever they are doing.”
Dokubo, however, assured of his determination to ensure the sustenance of peace and security in the Niger Delta through training and empowerment of beneficiaries of the programme.
“I am a new broom. I want to leave a footprint that people will say that there was a man called Charles Dokubo; he did his best for this programme.”
He listed the gains of the amnesty programme to include peace and security in the Niger Delta with the attendant increase in oil production and empowerment of the people in the region.