By Austin Ogwuda

ASABA—A massive fraud has allegedly been uncovered in the disbursement of bursary to students of Delta State origin in tertiary institutions, and this has prompted the state Governor, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, to personally order for a probe.

Although the state Commissioner for Higher Education, Dr. Hope Eghagha, recently said that the operations of the state Scholarship Board would be computerized in order to ensure efficiency in the payment of bursary, it appeared the loopholes were yet to be plugged, resulting in the latest scam.

Governor Uduaghan narrated how he uncovered the scam while speaking at the launching of the Rebranding of Nigeria Project in Delta State.

He said, “We removed all forms of payments even up to examination level. We also increased the bursary, but what did we see? We saw that operators of this programme put hurdles on the way, which made the programme difficult to operate.

“Just three days ago, I was at the Delta State University, DELSU, Abraka, and I was at a town hall meeting with the students. I asked them, how many of them had benefited from our scholarship and the number of hands I saw was amazing because we had released all the money for the bursary. We found out that there were two issues.

First, many of them who are not entitled to the fund were raising up their hands. We are going to investigate the whole thing. I had said they should give me the list of all the beneficiaries. It is also possible that those who are entitled to it are not the people getting it, so we are going to investigate that.

“For me as Governor, I will do my part to rebrand by ensuring that at least the lower segment of the society benefits from government programmes. But you the operator must also do your part so that the people we are targeting actually benefit from the programme,” he said.