The Federal Government plans to allocate N115bn in the 2026 Appropriation Bill to reintegrate former militants under the Presidential Amnesty Programme, marking a substantial funding boost.
This represents a 76.9 per cent jump from the N65bn earmarked for both 2024 and 2025, The PUNCH reports.
The new allocation is contained in the 2026 Appropriation Bill approved by the National Assembly, detailed in the House of Representatives Order Paper dated Tuesday, March 31, 2026, and in the budget schedule attached to the proposal.
The sum, domiciled under recurrent (non-debt) expenditure in the 2026 budget schedule, was retained intact by the House when it passed the Bill, indicating that the legislature did not object to the increase.
A comparison of appropriation documents across three fiscal years reveals that the programme’s allocation was held at N65bn in 2024 and again in 2025, a flat line for two consecutive years, before surging by N50bn in the current budget cycle.
The 2026 figure is the highest single-year allocation to the programme since 2017, when it received a flat allocation of N65bn. So far, the programme has received at least N700bn in the past decade alone.
Records obtained from the open-data platform Govspend showed that at least N8.6bn in identifiable payments were made by the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on the Niger Delta, the umbrella office administering the programme, from 2023 to 2025.
The most frequent expenditure involved the purchase of laptops for scholarship students, with at least 2,000 units purchased at a combined principal cost of N2.71bn.
The total amount climbed to N3.1bn when stamp duties, VAT and withholding taxes remitted to the National Revenue Service were added.
The Presidential Amnesty Programme was introduced in June 2009 to address unrest by offering amnesty to militants in the Niger Delta through disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration.
The proclamation followed years of militant attacks on oil infrastructure, kidnapping of oil workers and confrontations with security forces across the nine oil-producing states of the region, which had battered Nigeria’s crude output to as low as 700,000 barrels per day, well below the OPEC quota of 2.2 million barrels in 2008.
According to Yar’Adua, the framework was built on three pillars: disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration.
Militants who voluntarily surrendered arms within a 60-day window, from August 6 to October 4, 2009, were enrolled into training schemes and awarded monthly stipends.
By the close of the window, approximately 20,192 ex-militants had laid down their weapons.
The initiative was conceived as a short-term intervention, originally designed to expire five years from inception by 2014.
However, it has remained in operation for more than 16 years.
The programme has faced criticism over its lack of an enabling Act of the National Assembly, with critics arguing that the Presidential Amnesty Office, which sits within the Aso Rock Villa complex, was created purely by executive fiat without legislative backing.
The programme has also been plagued by allegations of fraud and elite capture.
In its 2021 study, the Stakeholder Democracy Network documented what it called “widespread allegations” that thousands of “ghost agitators,” non-existent or ineligible persons, were fraudulently inserted onto the payroll, enabling senior ex-militant leaders and political cronies to collect stipends meant for rank-and-file beneficiaries.
The study found that mismanagement had allowed elites to “develop ways to steer the PAP in their favour,” creating what it described as “complex and stubborn financial dependencies” that give powerful actors an interest in keeping the programme alive indefinitely.
The report read, “The PAP is spectacularly opaque compared to other government entities. For the past five years (2017-2021), the annual budget was N65bn, but no breakdown of how those funds are spent is published, nor any evaluation of completion or effectiveness.
“Independent observers repeatedly find that the PAP has failed to achieve its core mandate of skills development and employment, largely due to mismanagement of resources.”
It also argued that “lucrative pipeline security contracts are another important mechanism for placating ex-agitator leaders and their followers. Since the inception of the PAP, these have been routinely tendered by the FGN, as well as international and Nigerian oil and gas companies, to ex-agitator leaders.
“Unlike the other benefits on offer, pipeline surveillance contracts can run for multiple years, and are paid directly from oil companies rather than the government, resulting in a far more reliable income stream for ex-agitators. Yet the award is often connected to political allegiance and used as leverage for support,” the report read.
A 2018 probe ordered by then-coordinator Charles Dokubo into the enrolment of 1,061 scholarship beneficiaries found that only 314 were legitimate participants, and 747 could not be accounted for.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari dismissed at least two programme coordinators between 2015 and 2023 over allegations of mismanagement, though no convictions followed.
Ex-militants have repeatedly protested, including a 2023 march on the National Assembly gates over non-payment of stipends, and separate allegations of arbitrary delisting of genuine beneficiaries from the payroll.
In 2024, the Akwa Ibom Ex-militants Forum alleged that their members had not received stipends for several years despite a court order mandating payment.
Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Mr Bayo Onanuga, did not respond to calls and a text message seeking the Presidency’s comments on the increase at the time of filing this report.
