NDDC says London protesters failed to show up for screening last week

Foreign scholarship crisis:

Some 28 protesters at the Nigerian office in London early in the week were said to have failed to show up during a recent screening in some London universities to show proof of being foreign scholars under the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) sponsorship.

The embattled interim management committee (IMC) of the Commission said it did not even send any batch (2020) to London and could not be pressed into paying out over additional $3million after it had paid almost $6million.

The Commission wondered why it would be verifying the lists but some persons who ought to be keen to get screened would rather choose to go for protests on the streets of London while screening was going on in the universities.

In a statement signed by Charles Odili, the director, public affairs, the NDDC said there was huge need to verify the additional claims because the yearly amounts have shot up astronomically from a mere $900,000 few years back.

“The IMC finds it necessary to make clarifications on the recent protest of some students, who claimed to be beneficiaries of the Commission’s 2018 scholarship programme, at the Nigerian Embassy in London.

“We observe that the students were driven by mischief, otherwise they had the opportunity to present their case to the NDDC Acting Executive Director Projects (EDP), Cairo Ojougboh, who was in London on Thursday, September 17, 2020, with relevant officers of the Commission, to carry out physical verification of legitimate students on the scholarship programme,” he said.

According to him, “The NDDC team was scheduled to verify the unexplained discrepancies in the Commission’s foreign postgraduate scholarship programme and ascertain the true beneficiaries. Their brief included visiting the universities where the students are enrolled for various post-graduate degree programmes.

“Recall that recently, the NDDC IMC released $5,910,000 million through the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to offset all the verified outstanding foreign scholarship obligations, despite the non-passage of NDDC 2020 budget by the National Assembly.”

“Curiously, after this payment, a demand for an additional payment of $3million (Three Million Dollars) surfaced, with the claim that some students were not captured. This inexplicable increase made it imperative to verify and authenticate the real beneficiaries of the scholarship programme which started in 2010,” the statement added.