Amnesty Programme spent N6.8bn on laptops, others – Report

The Office of the Special Adviser to the President on the Niger Delta disbursed at least N6.8bn for goods and services under the Presidential Amnesty Programme between May and December 2025.

The bulk of the spending was channelled into mass procurement of laptops for scholarship students, according to data obtained from the open-government transparency platform, GovSpend.

Payments captured across 50 transactions on the platform, which tracks Federal Government expenditures, reveal that the Presidential Amnesty Office spent N5.47bn procuring 4,000 laptops through 10 separate suppliers.

It also paid N495.38m for 4,200 bags of rice described as intended for “stakeholders under the presidential amnesty programme,” and remitted approximately N814.9m to the Federal Inland Revenue Service in value-added tax, withholding tax, and stamp duties arising from those contracts.

Analysis by Sunday PUNCH revealed that the grand total of all identifiable payments within the period, combining principal contract sums and tax remittances, stood at N6.8bn.

The GovSpend platform, operated by BudgIT’s open data initiative, publishes government payment records sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Government Integrated Financial Management Information System.

The PUNCH had earlier reported that at least N8.6bn in identifiable payments had been made by the same Office from 2023 to 2025.

The data showed that laptop procurement dominated the disbursements.

In July 2025, two batches of 200 laptops each were purchased from Altitude Global Links Limited (N290.12m) and Barbolad Global Services Limited (N291.98m), signifying a unit price of approximately N1.46m per device.

Between October and December 2025, eight batches of 400 laptops were each procured from eight different suppliers, including Punwon Investment Limited which received two separate contracts totalling N1.09bn across October and December; Adinkra Finity Consulting Services, Eagle Eye Creative Visions Limited, Rainy Days International Limited, Godfirst Telecom Nig. Limited, Redefined Edge Limited, and Labour & Hammeer Limited each received one contract of 400 units ranging from N540.69m to N547.31m.

The data showed that the per-unit price of the laptops purchased from October through December was approximately N1.36m.

In addition to laptop contracts, the Office in October paid N495.38m to Adinkra Finity Consulting Services at General Contracts Limited for the supply of 4,200 bags of rice described as “for stakeholders under the presidential amnesty programme.”

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A further N18.26m was disbursed to Sam-Vic Insurance Brokers Limited in May 2025 as “reimbursement of taxes charged on payment of premium motor insurance policy for the office of the presidential amnesty programme for 2024/2025.”

The payments also show no fewer than 10 different companies were contracted to supply laptops within the same eight-month window, each supplying between 200 and 400 units.

The Presidential Amnesty Programme was established on June 25, 2009, when the late President Umaru Yar’Adua proclaimed amnesty for militants in the Niger Delta under executive powers enshrined in Section 175 of the 1999 Constitution.

The initiative was built on three pillars. They include disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration, as approximately 20,192 ex-militants surrendered arms within the initial 60-day window.

Originally designed as a five-year intervention set to end by 2014, the programme has now run for more than 16 years.

In 2026, the Federal Government raised the programme’s allocation to N115bn in the 2026 Appropriation Act, a 76.9 per cent jump from the N65bn allocated in both 2024 and 2025, and the highest single-year appropriation since 2017.

So far, the programme has gulped at least N700bn of public funds over the past decade.

A 2021 study by the Stakeholder Democracy Network found that the programme was “spectacularly opaque compared to other government entities,” adding that no breakdown of the annual N65bn budget was ever published, nor any evaluation of outcomes.

It documented “widespread allegations” that thousands of “ghost agitators” had been fraudulently inserted onto the payroll, and that mismanagement had allowed elites to “develop ways to steer the PAP in their favour.”

In August 2026, leader of the Niger Delta Liberation Force, Sobomabo Jackrich, petitioned President Bola Tinubu, warning that more than 2,000 former agitators of the Egberipapa Camp, excluded from the programme since its 2009 inception despite a 2021 Senate resolution directing their integration, could “resort to self-help” if their grievances remained unresolved.

Jackrich called for an independent forensic audit of the programme “from inception, covering appropriations, releases, expenditure, procurement and beneficiary records.”