Stakeholders’ Engagements: Group Applauds Presidential Amnesty Coordinator

Sylvester Idowu in Warri

South-South Reawakening Group (SSRG) has commended Presidential Amnesty Programme Coordinator, Dr. Dennis Otuaro, for engagements with stakeholders across the region in the quest to understand their needs, in terms of training and re-training of youths as well as empowerments of women and aged in various communities.

The group noted that besides creating an enabling environment for open feedback with the people, such engagements would also create an enabling environment for the people to be well informed on the activities of Amnesty program in the region and by so doing, bridge the gap of distrust and acrimony that had existed between management and indigenes in recent past.

SSRG, in a statement issued in Warri over the weekend signed by its Convener, Joseph Ambakederimo, also Chairman Board of Trustees, Community Development Committees of Niger Delta Oil and Gas Producing Areas (CDC), called for sustainability of the stakeholders engagement, as a way of giving the people sense of belonging.

The statement read: “The Presidential Amnesty Program coordinator Dr. Dennis Otuaru’s continued engagement with stakeholders and people of the region is very well articulated and a forward looking strategy in problem solving.

“We applaud the continued transformative stakeholders’ engagements in the region, bringing the people to speed with happening in the Presidential Amnesty Programme is key, it strengthens cooperation and build trust.

“The meetings and engagements undertaken by the leadership of the hold great potential to build strong, long-term partnerships that will not only connect people of the region but drives sustainable growth across multiple strata.”

The group expressed delight that the leadership is purposeful, responsive, and people-serving and urged leaders at all strata of society and all sectors including the governors in the region to reinvent themselves and lead with a servant leader mindset, and lead with selflessness and dignity in the mould of Dr. Dennis Otuaro.

The group stated: “The people’s livelihood, jobs and our national security are at stake if the Presidential Amnesty Programme is not sustained and improved funding is guaranteed.

“What we are advocating will cost money but some things are just too important to ignore, therefore making a case for better funding for purposes to expand the mandate of the programme will not cease.

“We will continue to make this case because the present leadership has shown undiluted capacity that needed to be encouraged and supported in all of its ramifications.

“The issues around calling for the expansion of the programme would be in addition to begin further engagements in collaboration with the Community Development Committees of Niger Delta Oil and Gas Producing Areas (CDC) and operators of the unlicensed refineries and pipeline vandals taking it from where the Community Development Committees of Niger Delta Oil and Gas Producing Areas (CDC) has achieved with a view to bringing them under the Presidential Amnesty Programme fold and provide alternative incentives to make them look away and have a new lease of lives.”

SSRG noted that the Presidential Amnesty Programme is the agency of government well suited to undertake the initiative that the CDC is putting forward “because in our interaction with the operators it was discovered that many of them are willing to further their educational pursuit, some are willing to acquire new skills in diverse areas of human endeavour such as steel fabrication and Metallurgy, areas where they have already shown some prowess and needed to be put through formal training that will further add to national development.

“It is important to note that the CDC has made very important gains chiefly amongst which is identifying and putting a face to unlicensed refineries operators in the region and the willingness of the operators to come out of the creeks and engage in meaningful talks that will eventually turn their lives and livelihoods for the better and for society.

“In view of the foregoing we urge the National Security Adviser, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, to take a critical view of the CDC’s initiative and successes to deepened this engagement with the operators and reap from the gains therein”.