The Managing Director of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), Mr. Nsima Ekere, a former chairman of the board of Ibom Power Company of the Akwa-Ibom State government and the state Emergency Management Agency, in this interview with SHOLA O’NEIL, S’South Regional Editor, talks about the pain of running a trust-deficient intervention agency, the N570million vehicle ‘scandal’, among others EXCERPTS:
On outsiders’ perception about Niger Delta youth
When you come here and you see people talking the way you are talking, it tells me there is hope. Virtually the entire world knows Niger Delta youths for confrontation and for making unreasonable demands. When I came in here and met a very different environment it gives me a lot of hope. What people know us for is aggression, street harassments, kidnappings, violence, blowing up pipelines. That’s what being a youth in the Niger delta is looked at and that’s how people see us.
Presently, Dangote is building the biggest refinery in the world and when I was in secondary school they taught us that one of the things you consider when building an industry is nearness to source of raw materials. That is a multibillion dollars investment and they are building pipelines for piping crude to the refinery; spending billions of dollars on a pipeline taking it to Lagos.
Why is that so? It is because nobody wants to put that kind of investment in the Niger Delta because of the impression they have of our youths. Just imagine the economic impact; multiplier effect of that investment in the economy of the Niger Delta. Thousands of jobs will be created directly and indirectly. Spending that huge amount of money in the Niger Delta will change our society, our lives and communities. And that is just one out of several.
There is this advocacy that SHELL (SPDC) should not relocate out of Rivers State because they were about doing that. Virtually all oil companies are doing that: Agip operates from Abuja; MD of Shell is in Lagos, MD of Chevron is in Lagos and virtually everybody is out of the town. I came into Port Harcourt in 1990 and served (NYSC) here. I was here for 17 years. The MD of Chevron was here in Trans Amadi, AGIP too. This is the effect that the perception that we have given to the world about the Niger Delta is having on us.
I had a meeting with a group at a hotel sometime last month and there were ex-agitators. Immediately I began to explain to them why they should change their behaviour and behave well so that it would be good for us, they said, ‘no we can’t beg them (oil companies) to come; if they want to go let them go’. They do not get it! It is a mind thing; if the mind is right, the attitude will be right and the outcome would be marvelous. There is the saying that your attitude determines your altitude in life. For you to have the right attitude, you must have the right mindset, education – formal and informal. If we do this, we will see that all these things that we are complaining about will begin to fall into place.
Niger Delta youths’ view of the NDDC and attitude to work
Let me digress also and talk about a few things I have been seeing in NDDC. Some youths come to NDDC with this sense of entitlement – it is my blood; ‘it is our thing; we fought in the creeks and we made this happen and they used to do this for us’. I asked a simple question: NDDC started about 16 years ago and everybody has been complaining about the effect of the commission on the society, if you want me to come and do what the others have being doing, that means at the end of the day when we leave, nothing would have changed. There would still be no development on the ground for anybody to see. So, if we want development and results, then we must begin to do things differently.
You are going to start hearing stories that this new MD, they don’t like him. They are very good at sending text messages that tomorrow they are coming on with a protest to NDDC. What I hear happened before now is that the former management would call them quickly and give them money and they would go. Once one group hears that you did that to one group today, the next day another group comes and before you know it NDDC money is going.
From the first day we stopped it. When we get that text message that we are coming tomorrow, sometimes the security agencies tell us, ‘we hear there would be a bloody, massive protest tomorrow’. I will say, ‘let them come’. I am willing to go and address them when they come. I am not going to give them any money. When nobody gave them anything they stopped.
Then there are these groups of young boys who stood around the gate of NDDC harassing people up and down. From the first day I came, I noticed that they would line on the street and be hailing you, calling you ‘Master’, and ‘Good man’ etc. In the first week, one of my aides thought he was being nice and going to please me, gave them money. I called him and warned him never to do that again. My thinking initially was that if two weeks they see nothing dropping they will stop, but they didn’t. I heard that they had given them jobs, send them to training, they finished the training and came back to still stand at the gate. I believe in sustainable development. If you are empowering somebody, do it in a sustainable way because if you are giving money and you stop, tomorrow they are back.
That is on one side. I am also having a lot of cyberbullying. I have people that go online and they would post all kinds of things: ‘Nsima Ekere is this and that’. I just ignore them. Then there is this particular guy, he would post and say, ‘he is very corrupt and he did this and all kinds of this’. The last one and I got a text message from him: ‘Check my blog, I have just posted something. Don’t you think it’s time we talk?’ I responded: ‘Go ahead and do your job’. Blackmail should not be a source of livelihood.
Plan for internet connectivity and hub in the Niger Delta
One of the things we want to do is to have the IT connectivity in the Niger Delta. We have had several meetings and there will be more meetings. The marine cables that brought internet from the US and other parts of the world to Africa, brought the same capacity/bandwidth to Lagos for Nigeria (175million people), as in Sao Tome, with less than 70,000 people. So they have the same capacity as Nigeria and there is a lot of wasted capacity there. So the meeting we have had in the last two weeks is working with Galaxy Backbone, a federal government owned company, to go to Sao Tome, get marine cable and pipe that excess capacity directly to the Niger Delta.
We have set up a technical committee working on this and they will present their report to look at it. We want to make this happen. We have two years in the life of this board and management. We don’t have that much time. I want to be able to achieve this in two years. That is one of the things we want to do.
We must begin to work on the mindset of our young people and let them understand that criminality is not the right way to go. As far as I am concerned, most of this so-called agitation is not agitation; it is criminality. We must begin to differentiate between agitation and criminality.
How youths can make the best of every situation
I will like to share with you the story of my life. My mother was a teacher, so I started primary school relatively early. In our days to graduate at 21 was a big. At 21 I was already out of university and doing my youth service. I was deployed to one of the federal services. Then I was involved in an accident that changed my life.
I had a very good friend, God bless his soul. He had this beautiful Peugeot 504 car and in those days that was a good car. One day, he was travelling, so he left his car with me for the weekend. On Saturday evening I went to a party with friends. I had a flat, which again was a big deal when I was young. After the party, there were some girls who didn’t want to sleep; they wanted to go back to their houses. I said let me go and drop them. I am happy this happened because it changed my life. I went and dropped them and this was around 4, 5am. The street to my house was being renovated and there was this heap of chippings that the contractor kept for the work. I dozed off and drove straight into the heap of chippings and the car was damaged.
Later I took the car to fix and the estimate was N700 and I didn’t have the money. My salary was about N180 naira, but I knew that I wanted to fix the car. I said ‘I must raise the money to fix this car’. So apart from my regular salary coming at the end of the month, because I am a real estate person, I said I must begin to do other things to ensure that I raised the money. And guess what, in less than two months, I raised all the money I needed to fix the car and more, just by working. I now said to myself, ‘so this is possible that if you do not just sit in your office and wait for the salary at the end of the month, if you take initiative and decide to run around, things can actually happen!’ That was it.
I finally just managed to hold myself for one or two more years and I resigned. By this time, I had raised up to N4,000 and that was when I came to Port Harcourt. I had a car, Peugeot 505, and N4,000. I rented an office for N1,500 (per annum), bought two tables and a secretary’s table and I started my private practice. In less than six months I started generating money and the rest is history.
My challenge to young people is that they should look for innovative ways of living their lives and the options and opportunities are so much out there. You would not imagine what you can do with your life with a little bit of innovation and drive.
On failures of past NDDC programmes
Most of the things that the NDDC has come up with over the years are things they want to use to appease those that are causing trouble. For me, it is encouraging other people. I hate to see that we are rewarding truancy more than good citizens. The scheme they had was to just take some of these boys and say they clean street, control traffic and they call them NDDC volunteers and pay them money at the end of the month. If you keep doing that for 50 years, you can’t see the qualities that we have and values we add to the society.
On the problem with NDDC scholarship programme
Unfortunately, we discovered that the NDDC hasn’t paid our scholars who are abroad. There is this funny policy (of the programme) where you first go to the school, register and then send an invoice from the school. The invoice is what is then used to process the scholarship and sent to you. The question I asked when I met with the team is that ‘I used to think you must pay some fees before you are registered in the school’. They said, ‘yes’. I said, ‘why do you put the cart before the horse?’
Anyway, that is what the policy is. When they send the invoice, we now give their account details for processing and payment of tuition fees to the school. But because the scholarship is worth $30,000, if your school fee is $20,000 or whatever it is, we pay the balance to the scholar for upkeep. The scholar is also to send his/her overseas bank details to be able to access this fund. As at (the time) only 32 of 200 scholars that won the scholarship last year have complied with that. So, 168 have either not yet sent in invoice or account details to be able to get that money. I directed that the 32 who met the policy guidelines should be paid. The appeal for those who have not yet met the requirements is to try and hasten it so that theirs can be paid.
But going forward, I am going to change that policy, because if you grant somebody scholarship you want them to benefit from it; you don’t want to put roadblocks to prevent them from benefiting. The challenge has been – from what we hear – that a lot of people know that for you to get the scholarship, you come with a letter of offer of admission in some selected courses.
On the N560 million vehicle controversy
Since the present management came on board we have not bought one vehicle. I am driving my personal car and my two executive directors are driving theirs. Any time my chairman comes into town he uses his car. The supervising minister for the NDDC, the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, has visited a couple of times on official visit to Port Harcourt and we don’t even have cars to send to the airport to bring him. We were just in the process of buying the vehicles. These days before you do anything you have to go the BPP. We wrote to them and they gave us certificate of no objection to buy the vehicles and we have that. The process is that once you get that, you take it to Federal Executive Council; they will deliberate on it and if they approved, they will give approval before you can buy. That process is ongoing and it is not completed.
Why there are suspicions about NDDC expenditures
I will be the first to admit it that the narrative of the NDDC over the years has been horrible and we are trying to change all of that. All we need is understanding from stakeholders and everybody. It hurts you when you know that you are trying to do the right thing and people just bad mouth you and say all kinds of things – it hurts. I am a human being and sometimes I am like, ‘maybe it is really not worth it trying to change anything; we should just continue…’
This is not how to support public officers with good intention to function. When we got into NDDC, we said for the first three months (there should be) a freeze on all contracts. I didn’t award one single contract, not because I couldn’t, but we didn’t do it. We have now advertised over 370 projects that we want to award. That is because if we don’t do it now the budget year is virtually ending. It is supposed to be March ending but now we have extension to May. If we do not do it most of what should have been done in this year in the budget would be lost; it would not be done.
Issues of NDDC corruption in the past
The problem is we don’t usually take stock and set the right governing structures in place. The reason NDDC was as corrupt, as it was, was because there was no international best practice in the ways things were done then. That is why we came up with the 4Rs to reform and restructure NDDC because we believe that everything must be done properly and we must all commit ourselves to the proper way of doing things.
