Sir: Each of Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones wanted a development commission, pushed for one, and got the same to leave Nigeria with more commissions with no real commission or cognizance among Nigeria’s poorest and most vulnerable people.
In 2000, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) was formed. Whoever told the government that curing the injustice in the Niger Delta region would take a commission clearly exaggerated their counsel because the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo approved the commission, and it was created to serve a region ripped apart by oil exploration.
Despite some feats here and there, the commission has largely been hit-and-miss. What it has however not failed to do is participate in Nigeria’s corruption bazaar. In fact, Nigerians have been treated to some frightening levels of graft at the commission such that it would amount to wildly sweetening the pudding to say that the commission has been a staggering success.
The clear struggles of the flagship regional development commission did not, however, prevent other regions for angling for same. It could not have. After all, many such projects in Nigeria are all about getting logged in to the national treasury and nothing more.
For years, the North, particularly the Northeast and Northwest, have been a cauldron of terrorist attacks and heart-breaking suffering for families, especially women and children. For more than a decade now, the devastation has been utter and complete. Schools, homes, and public buildings have been repeatedly razed across the region, plunging a region that did not have much to begin with, into new levels of despair and destitution. It therefore came as a little surprise that the good people of the region wanted a development commission too.
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Since then, the Southeast, North-central and Southwest have got their development commissions to complete the merry-go-round of development commissions. The last to be approved a few weeks ago was the North-central development commission.
With each of Nigeria’s six geopolitical regions now a proud owner of a development commission, is it simply a case of what is sauce for the goose being sauce for the gander, or do the development commissions have any roles to play in the regions?
More to the point: will the commissions serve the interests of the neediest in the respective regions, or will they be yet more conduits for frittering away public funds? The NDDC experiment lends a disturbing indication that at the end of the day, the development commissions would exist only to service a narrow strip of select interests across Nigeria.
Unfortunately for Nigerians and most disappointingly for Nigeria’s founding fathers, Nigeria’s set up as a federation has never really worked. Stripped of autonomy and confidence by the federal government’s extreme greed for power, the federating units which barely contribute anything at the end of the day prefer to bite and bicker at each other like a bunch of spoilt children. They often insist that whatever goes to one region must go to others and when this does not happen at all or quickly enough, it becomes a point of divisive disagreement.
The South-south region now wants a development commission to rival what other regions have. It conveniently ignores the fact that the Niger Delta Development Commission covers almost all the states in the region.
This proliferation of development commissions doesn’t just appear patronizing but also perfidious.