Plugging the Niger Delta amnesty sinkhole
The 2009 amnesty programme was a good-faith effort by then President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, to encourage militants in the Niger delta region of the country to lay down their arms and be reintegrated into normal life. In its original concept, the government’s amnesty policy was a broad and comprehensive plan to coax members of the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta, the umbrella organisation of the militants, into giving up their weapons in exchange for complete and unconditional amnesty and a chance to be part of the economic development and political process of the region and the country.
Crucially, it also had a limited lifespan. In fact, the amnesty window was supposed to last only a few months, after which the government would consider all those who did not turn in weapons in their possession at designated centres, renounce the vandalism of oil pipelines and accept terms of the amnesty, would be branded fugitives from the law and be treated accordingly.
The programme was the Yar’Adua’ administration’s masterstroke, which garnered widespread national applause and international acclaim. It portrayed the government as willing to bend over backward, for the sake of peace and stability in the country, to make deals with an organisation and other militancy platforms whose members had taken arms against the state, resulting in the killing of hundreds of security personnel and civilians, damaged vital public installations and bombed economic structures not just in the Niger delta region, but in other parts of the country as well. It was to provide skills and academic pursuits at home and abroad for them.
However, following Yar’Adua’s death in May 2010, the amnesty programme changed course and took on an open-ended budgetary bottomless pit, with the previous short window now removed completely, which means it has become a permanent part of the government’s bureaucratic structure. There are several problems associated with this development. The first is that the programme, which since Yar’Adua’s demise has been supervised by the Presidency that appoints a special adviser to execute its various projects, has proved t be a veritable cash-cow that dispenses public money to persons who do not earn it. The second problem is the absence of any form of accounting for all the budgetary allocations to what is now called the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP).
The third problem is that so much public money is being allocated to the PAP without any commensurate returns. It has created such a depression in the public treasury that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) had to raise some concerns regarding the ballooning expenditures of the PAP.
CBN Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi noted in a statement recently to participants of a youth employment summit in Abia State, that the amnesty programme had so far cost the nation over 1 billion dollars.
The PAP Chairman, Mr Kingsley Kuku, who is also the president’s special adviser on Niger Delta, said on Monday that the amnesty has so far received budgetary allocations totalling some 223.133 billion naira since 2010, and not 400 billion which some people he branded as ‘desperate politicians’ had claimed in the media.
Actually, the figure would be far higher, given the fact the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs and the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) make financial contributions to the amnesty programme; these are paid directly to the amnesty office. Another problem is the fact that the programme is a magnet for all manner of people who blackmail the government into doling out cash in the name of keeping them quiet.
That precisely is what Mr Kuku appeared to be endorsing when he said that the only way to stop the vandalism on pipelines and stealing of crude oil was for the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to employ ex-militants to secure them. It may be a good idea to engage the fox to guard the chicken coop, because that is what Mr Kuku’s advice amounts to, but it also seems to be admission that the country is not getting value for all the billions it has spent to turn the ex-militants away from militancy and a life of crime.
The programme’s expiry dates has been shifted several times; now Mr Kuku has put forth a plan to extend it to 2017. It has stayed too long already and taken too much for doing very little; it should close forthwith.