By Vincent Kalu
National President of Indigenous Igbo Youth Congress (IIYC), Chief John Mayor Echefu, has asked the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) to reverse its decision of excluding the South-East from its interview centres for the shortlisted applicants for this year’s Overseas Scholarship Scheme (OSS).
PTDF has shortlisted 8,800 candidates from over 26,000 applicants for this year’s Overseas Scholarship Scheme, OSS.
Mr. Bello Mustapha, Manager, Overseas Scholarship Scheme, PTDF, said the process, which started in December 2021, would see the shortlisted candidates interviewed across centers in Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Kaduna, and Bauchi.
He said: “Over 26,000 people applied for the scholarship and over 8000 were selected to come and do the interviews.
“We conduct the interviews in the six geopolitical zones of the country but we are doing in five geopolitical zones of the country this year because of the issues of insecurity in the Southeast.”
In his reaction, Echefu said it was an exhibition of highest level of hypocrisy for the manager of OSS PTDF, Mr. Bello Mustapha to single out the South-East for insecurity, when in the Northwest and Northeast zones, people hardly sleep with both eyes closed.
“Bandits have taken over many communities in the North-West; on daily basis, they kill people in their scores. The other day, how many did they kill in Katsina, the state of the president? How many did Boko Haram kill this week in Borno?
“If there were zones to be excluded as interview centres, it should have been the North-West and the North-East. This action of PTDF tell you how divided this country is. Mustapha and his people don’t want to remove the log in their eyes first, but the speck in others. This is hypocrisy.”
The PTDF OSS is an annual programme that awards scholarships to Nigerians for MSc and PhD studies in partner universities in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Malaysia.