Richard Imafidon

A popular adage says when the cat is away from the house the mouse has a field day. It does appear that the absence of President Muhammadu Buhari from Nigeria has given the mouse in the Ministry of the Niger Delta enough freedom to play games with the fortunes of the people of the Niger Delta.

How else can one describe the meddlesomeness of the Minister of the Niger Delta, Senator Godswill Akpabio, in the affairs of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) through an illegal interim management committee that is not recognized by the law which set up the commission? The minister set up the illegal committee before President Buhari sent the names of a 16-member board for the commission to the Senate for confirmation.

Now, as we speak, the Senate has duly confirmed the new board (minus one nominee) after its Committee on Niger Delta screened its members.

As the nation awaits the return of Buhari from a 10-day private visit to the United Kingdom, the question that requires an urgent answer from Senator Akpabio is what role his interim management committee would play, with the new NDDC board effectively in place, once it is inaugurated. Is it going to operate alongside the board but independent of it in a totally parallel arrangement?

What is the relevance of an interim management committee where you have a board that has been confirmed and inaugurated to function in the capacity envisaged for it by law? To which of the two bodies would the staff of the commission report for the day-to-day running of its affairs?

Because of the confusion that Akpabio’s interim management commission has brought about in the affairs of NDDC, reports are being bandied about to the effect that its mandate is to carry out the forensic audit of the commission the president talked about when he hosted Niger Delta governors not quite long before he travelled out of the country. This must be intended to be a joke. For, it can hardly be imagined that an exercise as serious as a toothcomb search of the books of an agency that has been mired in unwholesome exercises perhaps from inception could be left in the hands of politicians who themselves cannot pass any test of integrity, as far as the problems of the commission are concerned. One cannot recall reading media reports that indicated the president had mandated the minister to inaugurate the audit panel for the exercise before he left the country.

Reports indicate the general state of confusion that currently reigns in the commission’s headquarters in Port Harcourt, where beleaguered staff go to work every day in a state of utter apprehension, quite unsure of what would happen next. Activities in the commission’s offices throughout the Niger Delta have virtually come to a standstill, save for a few contractors that are said to have scurried back to the projects sites they long abandoned after collecting monies, in most cases upfront, just because the fear of prosecution has become the beginning of wisdom.

We have never had this kind of situation in NDDC in all its years of existence.

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One only hopes the president will consider as his number priority upon return the urgent step of restoring sanity to NDDC to save it from the reign of chaos that currently obtains on account of Akpabio’s overbearing attitude towards running of its affairs.

President Buhari must as a matter of urgency have the new board inaugurated once he returns to the country, so it can swing into action to begin the herculean task of addressing the challenges that currently face the people of the Niger Delta region. These challenges – corruption, mismanagement and inefficiency – all have their consequences on the underdevelopment and stunted growth of the region despite the humongous sums of money that have been sunk into the area without commensurate results.

It wasn’t possible not to notice the pain on Buhari’s face as he lamented to the Niger Delta governors the huge sums that have purportedly been spent in the region with virtually nothing to show in terms of development. It was apparently in his effort to achieve a clean break with the past that he carefully selected members of the new board that has just been confirmed by the Senate to run the affairs of the commission. He made them go through screening by the relevant security agencies to ensure they were not people who would come into the commission to perpetrate the same activities that are now about to be reviewed.

With the scaling of the Senate confirmation huddle, it is reasonable to believe that the new board, comprising men and woman of integrity they are, will be on the same page with President Buhari on his drive to ensure public institutions, especially one with strategic importance like NDDC, are managed on the highest level of integrity, transparency and accountability to make them achieve the purposes for which they were set up.

Now that the coast is clear for the inauguration and assumption of office of the authentic board of NDDC, it should be expected that the interim management committee would realize its irrelevance in the new scheme of things and step aside.

President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan, said this much when he made it clear that with the confirmation of the new board for the commission, any other structure that currently exists in the commission is vitiated. This should include Akpabio’s interim management committee. Lawan pointed out that the NDDC board is clearly established by the law that set it up, meaning that an interim management committee is not recognized by that law.

The Pius Odubu-led board needs a free hand to clear the mess NDDC has been in nearly all the years since its establishment and begin the process of genuine development of the Niger Delta region. Odubu has been tried, tested and found to be capable of steering the NDDC out of its present sorry state, having served as deputy governor of Edo State when Adams Ohsiomhole was governor. He has an accomplished professional as managing director and chief executive officer, in the person of Bernard Okumagba.

With the caliber of executive directors on the board, it shouldn’t be difficult to turn the fortunes of the interventionist agency around for the benefit of the people of the Niger Delta.

Imafidon, a lawyer, writes from Lagos.