Heads may roll over the discovery of alleged massive fraud at the Presidential Amnesty Office in Abuja.
The fraud was uncovered in the previous deployment of delegates for educational programmes at some universities in the country.
This was made known on Tuesday by Mr. Murphy Ganagana, special assistant to the coordinator, Presidential Amnesty Programme, Prof. Charles Dokubo, in a statement he issued.
According to him, the fraud was uncovered as a result of a verification exercise carried out at the instance of Dokubo.
He explained that the committee set up for the verification exercise discovered that the number of students as beneficiaries of the amnesty programme in various universities for various educational programmes was more than the number captured in the data base.
His words: “Against the backdrop of huge tuition fees forwarded to the office for payment by some universities in the country for supposed beneficiaries deployed to the institutions for study, Prof. Dokubo constituted a committee headed by the Head of Reintegration, Amnesty Office, Chief Aroloyeteim Brown, to verify beneficiaries of the amnesty programme in local universities.
“The committee was among others, mandated to ascertain admission process of the students into the various institutions and whether the students are beneficiaries of the amnesty programme, and, if not, who was responsible for their admission or deployment…
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“The committee which is rounding off its assignment, has however, uncovered large scale fraud in previous deployment of delegates not captured in the data base of beneficiaries of the amnesty programme to various universities within the country.
“Checks indicated that while a new university recently forwarded a list of 62 pre-degree students to the office for payment of tuitions fees the committee discovered that only 14 of them were captured in the data base of beneficiaries of the programme.
“And 34 out of 201 first year students at another new university in the Southeastern part of the country were also cleared as beneficiaries in the amnesty database.”
He added that out of another 290 first year students said to be in three universities in the South South, only 90 could be verified in the data base.
He stressed that Dokubo was concerned about the massive fraud and was already considering ways to address it.
