Boroh’s incompetence has killed Amnesty Programme-Prof. Tosan

Recently, a group of ex-militants leaders under the aegis of Niger Deltans for Accountability and Good Governance, NDAGG, vowed to launch a campaign for the removal of the Coordinator, Presidential Amnesty Programme, PAP, Brig.-Gen. Paul Boroh (rtd) on the basis of delay in payment of their stipends. Concerned by this development, GbaramatuVoice engaged a formost Niger Delta activist and a university lecturer, Prof. Tosan Blessing Harriman in an interview. The university Don said Boroh does not have power to take decision on his own but a character who has been acting inline with an edited script by his principals hence he has been performing below average, and so he has been appearing incompetent in the Presidential Amnesty Office in the past two years.

Excerpts

His take on call for Boroh’s removal

It is important we understand the frameworks of the nuances that devolved into the Amnesty Program, so as to draw attention to the lesions entailed  in the organization of State powers and to show how its reckless custodians have allowed our institutions and entities to cascade into a dizzying moral free fall.   This will help us to minimize dropping names and to focus on the broader issues of how we have generally come to making the business of Government an impossible adventure in sub Saharan Africa.  First, the Niger Delta militants’ disposition against the Federal government of Nigeria and the oil firms coupled with international pressures, compelled the Federal Government to grant amnesty to the Niger Delta Militants. The amnesty Deed was thus a desperate but critical first step effort by the Nigeria State to end the Niger Delta crisis, and thereby restore dignity and integrity to the process of oil expropriation from that part.  Former Nigerian President  Umaru Musa Yar’Adua  signed the amnesty after consultation with the National Council Of State. This assent was consequent upon an offer and acceptance proposition which specified a  60-day moratorium,  where armed youths were expected  to surrender their weapons to the government in return for training and rehabilitation as quid pro quo.  The program was continued into the present day President Muhammadu Buhari led Central Government after many initial seesaw bordering on the general absence of will to understand the strategic nature of the Deal. Militants led their groups to surrender weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades, guns, explosives, and ammunition. Even gunboats were surrendered to the government.  The amnesty office was able through its term to reintegrate the fighters into society, primarily by placing and sponsoring them in vocational and higher education courses in Nigeria and abroad.

This is the indaba of the matter, it should therefore not be too difficult for any reasonable government to continue in this noble initiative, giving the fact that the concomitant effect of reneging on this term could affect oil expropriation of the different joint ventures concern, an action which could lead to limited production outputs and by extension the economic mainstay upon which the entire gross domestic product of Nigeria is calculated.

If you ask me therefore what is my take on the score sheet of Brig. General Boroh (Ret), I would rather quickly posit, that there is no mystery in Government. It is a plain thing fitted to any honest altruistic intelligence.  Government should be an institutional repository through which development plans incorporating short, medium and long term goals are fostered. If Brig. Gen Boroh is thus not advising his principals on the nuances of his Executive portfolio especially as it relates to the urgency of undertaking its part of a brought forward Deal, it would only amount to making him and for that matter the Nigerian State,  a  laughing stock of the rest of the world, who want to behave like players in a game with no rules and no referee, a game in a field of moral free fall. Perhaps by way of a metaphor, that is really a summary of my candid evaluation of Brig Gen.  Boroh.

Xraying Boroh’s  performance as boss of the Presidential Amnesty Programme

How do you expect Brig. Gen Boroh to perform when he was reined in into the Amnesty Program not because he possessed the customs solutions required to improve on the service delivery aperture  of the scheme? I bet against anyone, He was probably brought there perhaps as a former lackey of the Commander in Chief, who may have considered the Amnesty program as another outlet to fritter scarce resources to the Niger Delta perceived as the epicenter for anything corrupt in Nigeria as though other zones are extricated from the malady that has inflicted our body politics with the injury that has brought it to this multiple complexes of endemic immobility. In which case, he thought to bring someone  who in his considered or unconsidered view, would run the place from an edited script given to him by those who are not interested in continuing with the program. If this is the case it will be difficult to access his performance as he is primarily there at the whim of his principal whose anti corruption campaign suddenly floundered in a sea of distrust  which turned out to be a subtle,  cynical, selective, conspiratorial tag team of blatant sorcery directed against perceived political opponents in the South South. No wonder the program rather than living up to its assigned responsibility, has begun in unconstitutional and wrong headed recrimination of the score of respondents it was created to serve.  To think that it is this  tired Brigadier General , that is being used to creating this illogical maelstrom, ratcheting up the volume of vitriol and creating a discordant orchestra of artistic chaos, puts him somewhere next to zero.

His advice for Boroh and the ex-agitators calling for Boroh’s removal

Now that the froth has come to the top: the apparent catharsis of a flawed and inept system masquerading as politics has triggered a diarrhea of protestation with dire consequences for the dominant space, it will amount to a sense of moral equivocation typical of the Nigerian perfunctory regime  to call for the head of Mr P.T Boroh. Succinctly  put, He should not have been there in the first place. Boroh appear to be an enigmatic binary choice that died on arrival. He should immediately seek the help of the career civil servants working with him in that corridor of the presidency so as to be educated on how the results achieved over the scheme under the previous dispensation were done. That way he will be able to generate a cost benefit appraisal of the situation to advise his principal. On the other hand, I will advise  the ex militants to work through their representatives to ensure that all outstanding issues that has to do with the settlements of  their agreed emoluments  are amicably resolved.  Banding together in the form of any group protest in this time of great national emergency  may be counter productive. Besides, there is the possibility that the Nigerian attitude of always playing the blame game may throw up another subtle diversion  where the legitimate demands of a shortchanged people, in which case the ex militants by the Nigerian State may be interpreted as an attempt inspired by a cortege of anti Buhari sentiments to embarrass the Nigerian State- Don’t be surprised they may mention former President Goodluck Jonathan or High Chief Government Oweizide Ekpemupolo as facilitators of any protest, to justify their arrant inability to dispense with  the cheeses of capital to the  contrite militants.

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