Ex-militants training: 6 to be repatriated from Sri Lanka

African Examiner

13 August 2011

Ex-militants training: 6 to be repatriated from Sri Lanka

Six ex-Niger Delta militants who had accompanied some of their colleagues on

a special skills acquisition programme in Sri Lanka are billed for repatriation to

Nigeria for engaging in violence, Special Adviser to President Goodluck

Jonathan, Mr Kingsley Kuku has disclosed.

According to Kuku, five of the affected ex-militants had attempted to extort

money from their trainers in a manner that suggested that there were not

interested in the programme, while the sixth used a bottle to break the head of

one of his colleagues during a scuffle and was promptly arrested by security

operatives.

Kuku who spoke through his aide Mr Lawrence Pepple at the graduation of a

batch of the ex-militants warned that the era they were pampered was gone...

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Meanwhile the Special Adviser has approved the payment of Transitional Safety Allowance (TSA) to the over twenty thousand Niger Delta militants who

embraced the Federal Government amnesty programme in October 2009 for

militants from the region who surrendered their arms in response to the peace

initiative from the Presidency.

In the parlance of the Nigeria Delta militants, the Transitional Safety Allowance

is known as Housing Allowance, and the agitation for its payment led to some

form of violent agitation by some of the former Niger Delta militants who were in

the first batch that were deployed to the transformational camp in Obubra,

Cross River State to undergo reorientation towards nonviolence.