Mkpoikana Udoma
Port Harcourt — As part of its on going reforms, the Presidential Amnesty Programme, PAP, says it has discovered that the Amnesty payroll was padded with over 400 duplicated names and ghost beneficiaries.
Interim Administrator of PAP, Col. Milland Dikio (Rtd) on Wednesday, said the reforms have so far revealed that some of the accounts were fake and fraudulently used to siphon funds meant for original ex-agitators.
Dikio speaking through his Special Adviser on Media, Mr Nneotabase Egbe, said he met the scheme in ruins and took steps to correct the anomalies, adding that the ongoing reform was already yielding fruits.
He said the irregularities noticed a year ago led investigations and verification of the 30,000 accounts receiving the N65,000 monthly stipends.
“Immediately the investigation commenced, the amnesty office stopped the stipends of the accounts undergoing probe. It is the right to do.
“I can tell you that some of the accounts had been cleared and their owners will receive their stipends.
“But efforts are being intensified to discover the identities of persons receiving monies through identified fake accounts,” Egbe said.
Dikio maintained that he was determined to cleanse the system to ensure that amnesty’s resources were expended on real and verifiable ex-agitators and not on impostors.
He added that no amount of blackmail and campaign of calumny would deter him from driving the reforms to a logical conclusion.
“Investigations revealed that contractors of the PAP office were not delivering their jobs in accordance with their terms of contracts.
“These contractors want to be paid for laptops that were not supplied and others who supplied, delivered counterfeit and substandard products.”
