The Presidential Amnesty Programme and the Nigerian Navy have agreed to partner on the training of former Niger Delta agitators.
The partnership is expected to lead to the creation of jobs for the ex-militants in the Niger Delta region.
The programme was put in place by the late Umaru Yar’Adua in 2009 to address the unrest in the oil-rich region.
The programme, has, however, been sustained by successive administrations.
A statement by acting Head Information, Alaenetonwa Lawson, on Friday, said the Interim Administrator of PAP, Maj-Gen Barry Ndiomu (retd.), received the Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Awwal Gambo in Abuja, expressing his readiness to work with the Navy to empower the ex-militants.
The statement partly read, “We’ll be very happy to explore ways and means to bring this collaboration to reality. I want to believe that amongst other things, this is the highest level of this meeting. I was amazed by the garment-making unit of the school. It is so elaborate.
‘’We have run dozens of training in the past but we have never had the opportunity to work with any of the academies that have the amount of infrastructure and the layout of what we saw at the naval engineering school.
“They make the garment there and they brand them. They stitch and package. What that tells us is that we can have our delegates acquire that skill and also understand what it means to specialize and they will have a good appreciation of the value chain.
“An end-to-end of it is that you can decide to major as a monogramming expert or as the one who is branding while another man is making the garment. Also, we observed that it was one man to one machine. So, there is no excuse for saying you don’t have a machine.
“Once again, you are highly welcome. We thank you for this visit and also for being willing and happy to work with PAP in moving our mandate to the next level.”
