What
is happening in the NDDC is a big whale feast with indiscriminate and soulless
butchering of the agency’s treasury. Nigerians in the Niger Delta asked for
development, but they were sectioned to endure pauperisation and the purloining
of their patrimony. They asked for guardians of the public till, but they were
handed hunters of the common wealth.
The
NDDC was established on June 5, 2000 as a response to the agitations of the
Niger Delta for development. But despite the huge chest of resources allocated
to this commission over the years, it has failed prodigiously to bring the
barest minimum of development to the region.
With
an annual budget of about N300 billion, the NDDC has nourished the flatulent
entrails of the behemoth of sleaze while the region it was meant to take care
of atrophied. There is perhaps no agency
of the government that has remained unaccountable and opaque with its
operations like this commission. The
agency is the proverbial ‘’regional cake’’ where governors from the south-south
and other interests ogle to take a slice.
The
Niger Delta is one of the most disadvantaged regions in the country in terms
human, infrastructural and material development. Less than 30 percent of the
natives have access to clean water. Poverty blooms in the villages and creeks
which are marooned from any form of modernity. The region plods away in
illiteracy and disease as basic sanitary system, schools and health care are
only a pipe dream.
This
is a region which is the breadwinning spouse of the country. Ninety percent of
the country’s revenue comes from the region. Between 1965 and 2000, Nigeria
earned over $350 billion from crude oil – according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Also, an audit report by Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative (NEITI) in 2018 showed that Nigeria earned as much as $677.9
billion in 18 years, between 1999 and 2016, from the sale of crude oil. But why is the country’s goose hungry; raped
and tortured?
We
must say, the Niger Delta is a victim of its thieving elite who appropriate and
expropriate resources meant for the people to themselves. The region must, as a
matter of urgency, rejig and nozzle its agitation to the enemies within.
In
October 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari
ordered a forensic audit of the operations of the commission from 2001 to 2019.
He said the current fortunes of the Niger Delta do not justify the vast
resources that have been funnelled into the commission. He was right.
Really,
the president’s decision to audit the NDDC is an intrepid quest. I doubt if any
other administration took the initiative to look through the iron shield of the
agency’s operations. But We are sceptical about the outcome of this adventure. Our
reason is simple. The current management of the NDDC overseeing the audit has
been alleged to be flunkeys of Godswill
Akpabio, the Minister of Niger Delta affairs, who himself has been accused
of complicity in the contract fraud at the agency.
The
allegations of Joy Nunieh, former
acting managing director of the NDDC, against Akpabio are thick and cannot be
discounted. Inasmuch as we think the
audit process is already tainted, we believe it should be done still. But we strongly believe we need to reconsider
the purpose of the NDDC. It has failed to achieve what it was set up to
accomplish. Do we keep feeding the beast? (Nation)
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