The Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) says the hundreds of youths who staged a protest along the East-West Road, on Wednesday, claiming non-payment of 23 months’ benefits were not part its scholarship scheme.

Mr Murphy Ganagana, Special Assistant on Media to the Chairman of the PAP, Prof Charles Dokubo, said on Wednesday that 10,000 scholarship beneficiaries under the scheme were getting their monthly stipends regularly.

He said that the PAP was up to date in its obligations to beneficiaries who are bona fide beneficiaries in PAP database.

“Those that were enlisted in the data base and offered starship have been paid up to this month, February. The protest is a cheap blackmail by persons who got into the schools through the back door,” he said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of undergraduates from ten different universities who said they were scholarship beneficiaries on Wednesday staged a peaceful protest blocking the East West Road for more than three hours.

The youths were demanding for their stipends from the Presidential Amnesty Office which they said have ran into 23 months.

The students who all wore black holding placards with inscriptions like “Dokubo, allow God to use you”, “Charles, we rejoiced over you, why are you now making us cry?”

Other inscriptions read: “Don’t push us back to the creek”, “Studying without feeding”, “Dokubo pay our stipends for two years”. Other inscriptions said that they were dying of hunger in their different universities and losing concentration, amongst others.

The leader of the protesting students, Gabriel Oyimbrakemi Zuobai, a 300 level hundred student called on the relevant authorities to persuade the amnesty office to pay them their outstanding stipends now.

“We are begging the relevant authorities to please prevail on our agency which is the amnesty office to ensure that our monies are paid.

“We are all students. We are hungry. What do you expect us to do in this kind of situation? At the initial stage, we were about one thousand plus but they decided to pay some persons and left the rest of us for the fact that they said that some of us are not captured in database

“As a matter of fact, we did not take ourselves to these schools. The school themselves called us and gave us admission letters. We did not send our names to the school. So we wonder why we will be deprived of our own stipends as indigenes of the Niger Delta.

“We are all students from different universities; over seven hundred of us. They are owing us for 23 months now.

“The reason was that we are not on data base. We wonder how amnesty office come to realise that some are on data base while some are not yet they recently deployed some persons,” Zuobai said.

There was heavy trafficking build up on the East-West road which stretched to several kilometres, subjecting motorists and passengers to intense heat from the scorching sun while the protest lasted.

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