Subject to the approval of the management of the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP), 1,000 repentant Niger Delta militants are billed to begin training at the cassava processing facility in Bayelsa State in the first quarter of 2022.
Project Management Consultant for the 60-daily-metric-ton Bayelsa Cassava Processing Factory, Adebowale Ayoade, says the training is also open to delegates of PAP.
Ayoade described the facility as the biggest industrial starch plant in Nigeria and the second largest in Sub-Saharan Africa, pointing out that delegates will receive theoretical and practical training on cassava cultivation, starch processing and management.
Interim Administrator of PAP, Miland Dixon Dikio, a retired Nigerian Army Colonel, who was represented by his Special Assistant on Projects, Godwin Ekpo, recently inspected the multi-billion naira factory, located at Ebedebiri in the Sagabama area of Bayelsa.
Ayoade has explained that after the training the ex-agitators would become outgrowers of cassava stems to feed the factory.
He said the facility will buy all the cassava from the farms to be established by trained delegates adding that the training would be handled by resource persons certified by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).
According to him, every arrangement for the training such as accommodation for delegates, their feeding, resource materials and facilitators had been put in place to ensure a smooth take-off and conclusion of the programme.
While he said the training venue is the University of Africa (UOA) satellite campus close to the cassava processing plant in Ebedebiri, adding that the ex-agitators will have a rewarding experience, he pointed out, “they will be taught theoretical and practical cassava farming courses from beginning to end, both in the classrooms and farms. The people who are coming to conduct the training are IITA certified trainers.
“The factory can do 60,000 metric tons of industrial starch working at a single shift of 250 days in a year and what that translates to is that we need about 200,000 tons of cassava to feed it. We need to farm on 10, 000 hectares of land.”
Dikio had earlier explained that PAP settled for the Cassava Processing Factory to train ex-agitators on skills they required to boost food security in the Niger Delta and the country, insisting that food security remained one of the tripods of his vision to train, employ and mentor ex-warlords on massive opportunities in agriculture including cassava farming and starch processing.
He said the factory, built by the Bayelsa State Government, has modern equipment to teach the amnesty delegates the process of converting cassava to starch, adding, “the 60 metric tons of cassava processing plant has a huge capacity and it is part of the facility that we will use for our Train, Employ and Mentor (TEM) empowerment strategy.
“The facility will help many of our delegates and give them employment. It is an incredible facility located in the region. It will help them and also achieve our vision of turning these ex-agitators into entrepreneurs”.
