Presidential amnesty programme reviews its offshore education policy

THIRTY-four beneficiaries of the Presidential Amnesty Programme are set to be called to bar this year, even as 207 other students spread in 66 institutions in 20 countries are currently undergoing different courses.

Special adviser on Niger Delta and coordinator for the presidential amnesty programme, Professor Charles Dukubo who disclosed this at an interactive session with journalists in Asaba said the office was up to date with its payment to students and other beneficiaries.

Speaking through his special assistant on Media, Mr Murphy Ganagana, the coordinator said he recently visited students sponsored by the amnesty office in London and met with 47 of them and other recent graduates from 25 institutions in the United Kingdom.

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According to him, the objectives of the visit were to evaluate their progress, celebrate those who are at the verge of completing their programmes and charge others to be good ambassador of the programme.

On the review of the on shore and off shore education policy of the amnesty office, the special adviser disclosed that following appeals from students for the amendments of educational policy as it affects them, the office constituted a committee with a view to ensure that students under the programme successfully graduated.

While the off shore education unit (those  studying abroad) had in the past five years implemented eleven key operational policies to guide deployment and management of off shore students, Dukubo disclosed that the committee reports indicated that they were no set policies as at May 2018 to guide the operations of the unit.

He stated that the amnesty has started reviving training centres, which were hitherto abandoned and shifting its training grounds to institutions from private hands in order to be able to give certificates to trainees, after at least six months of training as against the crash programme of three months.

Some of the institutions being partnered with according to him include; Petroleum Training Institute, Effurun, for the training of 200 youths in oil and gas and United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), among others.