Funding for the activities of the Niger Delta Development Commission received a boost when the House of Representatives added the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas company to the list of contributors recently. The amendment to the company’s Fiscal Incentives Guarantees Assurance Act provides that it should pay three per cent of its budget to the commission, in line with the statutory obligations of oil and gas companies to the commission.
The bill, which will be sent to the Senate for concurrence, before being assented to by the President, already has sparked remonstration from the NLNG. It feels the action is capable of stifling investment. Until now, the company was insulated from the three per cent contribution, an incentive it had enjoyed for the past 27 years. But the Minority Leader in the House, Leo Ogor, who sponsored the bill, and his colleagues had argued that bringing the NLNG to the funding net would help in addressing the environmental degradation challenges of the region. Five decades of gas flaring and oil spills and little or no development, spawned a feeling of marginalisation and alienation. This resulted in insurgency that often imperils Nigeria’s oil-dependent economy.
Against this background, the Federal Government set up the NDDC as an interventionist agency. Since then, it has embarked on the provision of infrastructure: building of roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, support to tertiary institutions in constructing hostels, classrooms and laboratories; rural electrification and potable water in rural communities, among others, in the nine states of Abia, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Edo, Delta, Imo, Ondo and Rivers that come under its canopy.
Regrettably, the well-intentioned policy has been grossly messed up as the projects are often plagued by corruption and abandonment, after billions of naira had been paid to contractors. Oddly, the elite of the region, who are, in the main, the contractors are the culprits. The Ijaw Youth Council, in an indignant response to the malaise, in 2015, demanded a radical transformation of the commission from the Muhammadu Buhari administration. Tellingly, in a statement, it said, “Institutions run by Niger Deltans to empower the people and develop the region are conduits for stealing money – we are our biggest problems.”
This is the crux of the matter. From the Presidency to management personnel, their indictments of NDDC operations have been resonant. The Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, while in the region in March on a fact-finding mission and irked by what he saw, directed all contractors who had abandoned their projects to return to the sites within 30 days or be jailed.
And after the inspection of a three-storey hostel complex at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, in April, the present Managing Director, Nsima Ekere, was full of lamentation: “When contractors claim to have capacity they don’t have, they give the NDDC a bad name. Henceforth, projects will no longer be awarded to political patronage.” Again, his predecessor, Ibim Sememitari, was bemused by how the region had become a landscape of abandoned projects when she embarked on similar inspection tours from one state to the other.
As of 2014 when former President Goodluck Jonathan inaugurated the last board of the commission under his administration, 285 abandoned projects were scattered in the region. He, therefore, directed that award of fresh contracts should stop, while completion of existing ones be made top priority. But the directive was ignored.
Essentially, the funding of NDDC activities is not its biggest challenge, but lack of committed management before now to oversee its realisation of government’s objectives. It had watched the pillaging of its resources through contract inflation and abandonment. The chairman of the agency’s new board, Victor Ndoma-Egba, disclosed recently that the commission’s 15-year-old master plan was not being followed. How to revalidate, upgrade, or come up with a new one is the challenge now; just as about N200bn worth of projects are to be cancelled in response to recklessness in the award of contracts in the past.
These are fundamental challenges that have to be fixed, if the agency is to achieve its core mandate. As things stand now, a forensic audit of its finances since inception cannot be ignored anymore. It is beyond any question that due process breaches and corruption have defined NDDC’s existence. However, it is the Federal Government that should be given the hardest hit for failing in its responsibility: strict control and supervision as espoused in Section 7 (3) of the NDDC Act have been lacking. Ndoma-Egba’s observation decidedly is an indictment of his predecessors, which should merit Abuja’s attention and severe sanctions. Government has to face the responsibility of ensuring that those who have undermined the NDDC’s objectives are brought to book.
Lack of it so far is why it has derailed. It is, therefore, in the enlightened-self interest of the region’s elite not to continue to see the agency as a honey pot. It should be clear to all the stakeholders that the NDDC was not set up to create emergency contractors or billionaires, but to foster development in the region. Youths who are already agitated by how their people have betrayed this cause should begin to act as its watchdog; and, should the need arise, blow the whistle.
