By FIDELIS SORIWEI

In 2024, when President Tinubu appointed Dr. Dennis Otuaro as the Administrator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP), the region heaved a soothing sigh of relief. In fact, the alignment between the appointment and expectations was real. Across the Niger Delta, it was the prevalent expectation that Otuaro would reposition the agency for notable impact.

Those abreast of the Niger Delta story and the persisting clamour for development in the region celebrated the appointment of Otuaro, as an indication of President Tinubu’s genuine concern for the region. And going by the score card of Dr. Otuaro after two years, their expectations were not misplaced.

Otuaro has the reputation of a key stakeholder and grassroots player with a passion for development, peace and security in the region.

Prior to Otuaro’s appointment, President Tinubu’s predecessor, the late President Muhammadu Buhari appointed interim administrators to oversee the affairs of the PAP with a covert mandate to bring the Programme to an end. The PAP was stifled by the aura of uncertainty around its existence which heightened under Buhari.

However, President Tinubu’s appointment of Otuaro was a sharp deviation from the past. It came with a of glimmer hope and renewed expectation that the PAP would be repositioned to play its own role of entrenching the peace and security in the Niger Delta.

While taking over the office, Otuaro took his time to come up with a strategy that would be effective in tackling the menace of insecurity in Nigeria’s oil rich Niger Delta. Aware of the huge burden of expectations on his shoulder, he identified bridging the human capital development gap as central in the proactive steps to tackle the seemingly endemic insecurity in the Niger Delta.

While Otuaro has given the deserved attention to the immediate needs of the ex agitators captured under the programme, stake holder engagement and vocational training, peace building among others, he decided to exploit the tool of education to address the insecurity challenge in the region. Thankfully, he met a functional tertiary education scholarship component of the Education unit of the agency which fits perfectly to his long term prescription to the issue of insecurity in the region. He holds the view that those who want to tackle insecurity, build genuine and lasting peace must recognize the vital place of education and human resource development.

With the then state of funding at the PAP, his beautiful ideas sounded like some impossible dreams that may not transcend the borders of desire. Otuaro clutched unto his focus for impact and took immediate steps as the new head of the PAP. He knew the critical place of funding to the realization of his administration’s policies.

Fortunately, the office of the National Security Adviser and the Presidency saw the strength in his plea for increased allocation to the PAP. His position to exploit the tool of education alongside ongoing efforts to pursue the desired peace in the region was readily acceptable to the government.

As a champion of peace and security through education opportunities, Otuaro has put the PAP on the lips of the Niger Delta people in the past two years. It is on record that when he took over as the PAP Administrator, he inherited a total of 1,964 students in Nigerian universities and 38 students in foreign universities under the PAP scholarship scheme.

Two years after, the PAP under Otuaro has so far deployed a total of 8, 205 students. He deployed 3800 students in the 2024/2025 academic year, and 4405 in the 2025/2026 academic session within Nigeria .

Unrelenting in his pursuit of human resource development gap in the region, Otuaro gave scholarship opportunities to 162 students from the region to pursue post-graduate programmes in targeted disciplines in universities in the United Kingdom.

Records at the PAP show that since inception a total of 5,798 students have so far graduated from the scholarship scheme, far less than the figure deployed in the two years of Otuaro’s administration.

Aside providing the requisite learning aids such as laptops for the beneficiaries, Otuaro ensured that the PAP scholarship scheme is wrested from the talons of greedy people who hijacked scholarship opportunities for sale. His threat to deal decisively with the malaise worked the wonder of getting the real beneficiaries for the limited scholarship opportunities.

The sustained efforts being made by the PAP in peace promotion is yielding obvious results in universities across Nigeria. In 2025, Thirty-two students on the scholarship of the Presidential Amnesty Programme made first class in various competitive courses in universities in Nigeria. Records at the PAP also show that a total of 134 scholarship beneficiaries also graduated with second-class upper division in various courses of study in the same year.

The courses are law, pharmacy, aeronautical engineering, cybersecurity, electrical engineering, software engineering, nursing science, mechanical engineering, architecture, accounting and criminology, computer science, and anatomy.

Others are international relations and diplomacy, geography and regional planning, microbiology, public health, information technology, medical laboratory science, estate management and mass communication.

It is a fact that a strong statement on lasting peace and security is being made in the region in authoritative terms. Those wielding first class Honours and second class Honours degree in professional disciplines and others can be rightly assumed to have good opportunities in life which they will never trade for crime.

It is also worthy of note that while Otuaro intensifies efforts in educational deployment as a strategic long term masterstroke to the issue of peace and security in the Niger Delta, he has sustained efforts in vocational training for the teeming youths, peace building and periodic engagement with stakeholders across the region.

Otuaro holds the view that a deliberate step to promote education in the quest for genuine and lasting peace cannot be faulted. It is also his contention that a half-hearted approach to the quest to bridge the human capital gap in the region as an effective antidote to crime and violence remains unacceptable.

Many are of the view that Otuaro has started a revolution on an amazing scale whose impact in the years to come will change the story of the Niger Delta and put the region on the path of stability.

While expressing his happiness over the encouraging academic feats of beneficiaries under the PAP, Otuaro would always attribute the success recorded to President Bola Tinubu and the National Security Adviser whose office supervises the PAP.

"We express our deep appreciation to His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR. Without his strong support, these impressive academic feats of our scholarship students and all the success stories recorded would not have been achieved.

"We also extend our sincere gratitude to the Office of the National Security Adviser for effectively supervising the programme in line with Mr. President's Renewed Hope Agenda for the people of the Niger Delta.

"We have a listening father in Mr. President who has shown it clearly in his actions that the Niger Delta is on his priority list of development. He has given priority to agencies in the region aside from the ongoing efforts in the construction of the trans-Niger Delta Highway from Lagos to Calabar.

"The people of the Niger Delta are happy with Mr President and what his administration is doing for the region, and will react in due course with the right expression of gratitude." He had said

•Fidelis Soriwei, a Media Consultant, publishes thenetwork.ng