By Philemon Asonye Ogbonna
The Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) for a few years now, seemed to have embarked on a journey of outshining the defunct Nigeria Electricity Power Authority (NEPA) in terms of being a source of bad news most of the time, if not all the time.
Interestingly, both institutions share two things in common. While the defunct NEPA received so much money and was known for inefficiency, the NDDC is also reported to have been allocated a humongous amount of money, yet there is not much to show for it. President Buhari himself had said that what was presently on the ground in the South-South region (which in this context is the NDDC States) did not justify the huge resources that have been made available to the NDDC. Regrettably, it has been bad news and bad news.
This time around, the bad news the NDDC has been grappling with is the appointment of a Sole Administrator to run the Commission for an unspecified period, but one thing that is clear is that the Sole Administrator remains in office until the Forensic Audit is over. It might be pertinent to add quickly that President Muhammadu Buhari had, on October 17, 2019, ordered that the operations of the NDDC between 2001 and 2019 would be audited. The pronouncement of Mr President is today more than fifteen months old.
It was relieving to hear the Niger Delta Minister, Sen. Godswill Akpabio says, recently, that the NDDC board will come into being latest by April, this year. He also said that the new Board of the Commission will work with the outcome of the Audit exercise, which received applause from many quarters in the Niger Delta states when it was announced.
Even though the dissolved Interim Management Committee of the NDDC, which was expanded in February 2020, was expected to supervise the Audit for a period of six months, it will still be heartwarming if a Board eventually takes over from the Sole Administrator in April.
It really has been a source of worry to many stakeholders in the Niger Delta project why the forensic audit has dragged till this time. The last comment attributed to the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Sen. Akpabio on the issue of delay, was that the passing of the budget of the Commission was delayed by the National Assembly.
The way a lot of things have been running in the Country has created a lot of cynics. Only very few trust that governments will do things based on the time-table they have given themselves. By the time April comes, it will not surprise many if the government decides to extend the tenure of the Sole Administrator for one reason or another.
As arguments continue to rage in the mainstream and online media as to the legality or otherwise of the position of a Sole Administrator in the Act establishing the NDDC, it becomes important to begin to address the issue of whether Mr President is expected to inaugurate the Board of the Commission already screened and approved by the Senate or reconstitute a new Board, whose membership would be sent to the Senate for clearing before an inauguration can take place.
One thing that is inevitable is that the forensic audit will come to an end one day and when that happens, the nation will be waiting for either reconstitution of the NDDC Board or the inauguration of the one cleared by the Senate.
It is known that the Board that was cleared by the Senate raised issues that were not properly addressed by the Senate before it hurriedly cleared it. One of the issues had to do with the legal instrument that set up the Commission. The NDDC Act provides that the Chairmanship of the Board should move from one State to the other in alphabetical order. This provision was said to have been breached, as it was claimed that it was not the turn of Edo State to produce the Chairman of the Board at the time.
I know that any information that our government doesn’t have about itself does not exist. It is my thinking that government should begin now to tidy up its documents as they relate to the NDDC before the Audit is over. There is no gainsaying the fact that this government knows the proper things to do. Let things be done in line with the Act governing the NDDC. It will also make good sense to ensure that any person who has had the opportunity to serve on the Board of the NDDC between 2001 and 2019, being the period covered by the forensic audit, should not make the new list to avoid perpetuating corruption, which has given the Commission a bad image.
The fact that the NDDC has been mired in controversy for years, anything that has the potency of constituting itself into a cog in the wheel of its progress must be envisaged and taken care of. In the past, there were cases when indigenes from non-oil producing areas were nominated for the Board, culminating in protests, petitions etcetera. Abia, Imo and Ondo were usually victims, and because of the way government runs its affairs, it would take a long time before such mistakes are corrected. Who suffers?. The affected NDDC States, yet the government is desirous of ensuring that there is an absence of insecurity in the land.
It is common knowledge that Security Agencies are supposed to run checks on individuals, but why such mistakes are still made can only beat one’s imagination.
The time to begin is now so that when a new Board is reconstituted, it will hit the ground running.
Ogbonna, a financial expert, writes from Port-Harcourt
