Godswill Akpabio, a lawyer, senator and former governor of Akwa Ibom State is not a man who walks with his head bowed. He is bullish with development, especially infrastructural development. He acquitted himself in Akwa Ibom where he left imprints of uncommon transformation. He was a five-star performer among his generation of governors.
Now as Minister of Niger Delta directly supervising the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, Akpabio has a wider berth of responsibilities. He must not only ensure development of the oil-rich but much abused Niger Delta region, he must first tackle and arrest the incubus of corruption that has haunted the development intervention agency.
Akpabio has a strong ally in President Muhammadu Buhari who last year ordered a forensic audit of the NDDC. Buhari like most Niger Deltans are not happy that despite huge sums channeled through the commission, communities in the Niger Delta which bear the oil are light years away from civilization and development. This writer performed his mandatory national youth service in the creeks of the Niger Delta, precisely at Mater Dei High School, Imiringi community in present day Bayelsa. Imiringi was where you have the gas turbine. Call it the capital town of gas flaring. The community where sleep is murdered every night; where the air is constantly abused with flared gas; where the ozone layer is in unrelenting abrasion from burnt gas emissions.
Imiringi is the archetypal mirror on the Niger Delta. Dead flora, varnishing fauna. A bleached, scorched earth. We had pipe borne water but lo, it’s heavy in lead and iron: brownish and unfit for consumption. The roads were a death-trap. The good roads only led to oil rigs and facilities, no more. The oil majors who constructed the roads didn’t build it for the natives and residents. It was to serve their commercial purpose and facilitate their viperous preying on the sweet crude. In Imiringi, I saw extreme poverty on the side of the natives cohabit with extreme wealth on the side of the oil workers. I encountered grim privation. I also encountered grandeur and opulence among the visitors who traversed the abused ecosystem in their utility vans. I saw a people conquered by predatory oil explorers but I fathom they didn’t realize the enormity of their conquest and the damage done to them and generations unborn. Imiringi as a metaphor for the Niger Delta region was the breeding ground of injustice, man’s inhumanity to man and inequities.
These were the gaps that the NDDC was created to fill. We can blame Chief Olusegun Obasanjo for many things, but it was his government that birthed the NDDC as a special purpose vehicle to speed up growth and development in the Niger Delta region. A good 20 years after, that mandate remains a mirage. Huge money came from both government and oil companies. Opportunities for wealth creation were presented to the people. But all the resources, in billions of naira, had been frittered away, this time not by agents of the oil majors but by the elite of the Niger Delta and their briefcase-carrying cronies. The Niger Delta, the mother hen that laid the golden eggs that kept Nigeria breathing for over 50 years, remains a wasteland, a famished shadow of its old self.
Enraged with righteous anger, Buhari directed that a forensic audit be carried out on the commission. And in Akpabio, President Buhari found a worthy son of the Niger Delta to undertake the hard job. And here is the problem. Vested interests in the NDDC both serving and retired and their platoon of coconspirators are hauling pellets at Akpabio. Only a man who has dirty linen would guard his cupboard even with a bayonet. The guilty are already afraid. And they are taking their anger and bile on Akpabio. They want to frustrate the audit. They want to protect their loot from the prying eyes of the auditors. It cannot work. Even the gods of the abused land are angry with the clan of looters. Akpabio had earlier described the NDDC as some people’s ATM. He would clarify this to mean that some people erroneously see the NDDC as a place where money grows as low-hanging fruits which they must pluck even before they are due for harvesting.
“Some people just collect money from the commission; they have no skill, no capacity for the job but they are awarded contracts and they pocket the money and disappear. We want those money to be accounted for. There must be an end to such situation.” To use his exact words: “I think people were treating the place as an ATM, where you just walk in there to go and pluck money and go away, I don’t think they were looking at it as an interventionist agency.”
Upon assuming office, Akpabio raised a red flag: There were 12,000 abandoned projects littering the region. Incredible! And then more revelations: The Interim Management Committee, IMC, of the NDDC has released its findings. And they are as messy as they are startling, to wit, that a past NDDC management awarded 1,921 ‘emergency contracts’ at N1.070 trillion in just seven months, against an annual budget of about N400 billion. Contracts that do not qualify as “emergency contracts’ were converted to ‘emergency’; some contracts only existed on paper but cheques were raised for payments. Magic!
In 2015, the then Auditor General of the Federation, Samuel Ukura, affirmed that over N183 billion was missing from the accounts of the NDDC despite denials by officials of the Commission. The NDDC is a nest of scam. How do you justify that a serving senator would have the ‘privilege’ of handling 300 contracts for the NDDC? These are clear incongruities that have reduced the commission to a conduit for milking the people. The persons behind these heists are powerful. Empowered by their loot, they must do all in their power to undermine Akpabio and the acting managing Director of the commission, Professor Kemebradikumo Daniel Pondei. They are intent on frustrating the IMC from its primary mandate of exposing the diary of financial scandals that define the NDDC. Strangely, they have found cheap recruits in the media space.
Akpabio and his team must strive to rise above the muckrakers and those raking the muck. The media blackmail to abort the forensic audit must be seen for what it is: desperate kicks from a gang afflicted by the guilt of their misdeeds; misdeeds that have robbed the Niger Deltans of development over the years.
But I trust Akpabio not to budge. He must rally his team at the IMC to salvage whatever is left of a commission that was created solely to bring light to a people mired in the blackness of darkness.