PH Mundial – Port Harcourt Online Newspaper News Across The Region
Related Articles
By Amos Odhe, Yenagoa
Ex-Militants from the nine states of the Niger Delta Region have called on President Muhammadu Buhari not to “listen to clamour from paid publicists and campaigners calling for the re-appointment of the immediate past interim administrator, Major General Barry Tariye Ndiomu (rtd.), whose tenure expired on Friday, March 31, 2023.
Alleging that “he has since fled abroad for fear of being arrested on numerous allegations of fraud, corruption and public funds embezzlement,” the ex-militants claimed that “despite the fact that the appointment of Major General Barry Tariye Ndiomu (rtd) has become the worst made under President Buhari’s administration, it has tainted the entire 8-years achievements that the Buhari administration recorded under the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP).”
The ex-agitators, under the aegis of the Niger Delta Peace Renaissance, alleged that the tenure of Major General Ndiomu (rtd.), “was characterized with fraud, desperate deletion of over 3,000 Amnesty beneficiaries from the database with their monthly allowances diverted for personal use, scholarship fraud, procurement fraud, unpaid and diversion of Amnesty beneficiaries’ allowances, bribery, incompetence and gross misconduct.”
The former agitators, led by Comrade Layeifa Dumbo, described the recent campaigns calling for the re-appointment of Major General Barry Tariye Ndiomu (rtd.) as a “sponsored effort” by those involved in the alleged fraud in the Amnesty Programme,” adding that “we demand that Ndiomu and other top staff indicted over the rising cases of alleged fraud and diversion of funds under the Presidential Amnesty Programme, PAP should be sacked, investigated and arrested.
“As at the moment, Major General Barry Tariye Ndiomu (rtd) is out of the country in fear of the planned protest against his re-appointment and arrest, therefore, we call on President Buhari to allow the most senior civil servant to take charge of the Presidential Amnesty office for the next 60 days remaining life span of the present administration.
“He made an open display of the alleged fraud in the Presidential Amnesty Programme when he suspended two account office staff (Mr. Cletus Robson and Mr. Olusegun) over the facts listed in the petitions filed against interim administrator, Major General Barry Tariye Ndiomu (rtd.), and some senior staff for alleged fraud, forgery, gross misconduct and financial misappropriation.
“Ndiomu has done great disservice to the people of the region. His intentions for our people are wicked. He is the first Amnesty boss in the history of the PAP not to deploy a single individual for vocational training, initiate any type of trade empowerment programmes, or deploy a single student for higher education to any university, despite the billions of naira at his disposal. Rather, he continually brag and boast of delisting the names of our suffering people from the Amnesty Programme,” they said.
The ex-militants and aggrieved beneficiaries frowned at “the numerous fraud and corruption allegations leveled against the interim administrator week after week,” while warning alleged “paid handlers of Ndiomu’s social and news media to desist from using propaganda to spread misinformation to cover up the failures of their boss.
“We challenge any one of these paid propagandists to show us one positive project his administration has done since his appointment in September 2022. We are the true owners of the Amnesty Programme, and we will not keep silent as our funds are being siphoned by a corrupt individual, and for the memories of our loved ones who sacrificed, fought and thousands of them died prior to the proclamation of the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) in 2009 be destroyed by an incompetent and corrupt individual.
“Since the appointment of the present administration into the Presidential Amnesty office, and with the billions of naira at his disposal, not a single PAP beneficiary or anyone from the Niger Delta region have been deployed for training or empowered. What a shame!”
