What Next after NDDC Forensic Audit Report?
The NDDC must return to business quickly. The people of the Niger Delta and indeed, the entire Nigeria have lost so many opportunities in the last couple of years that the Commission has remained comatose.
It is exactly 20 years today that the NDDC was set up. Sadly, it has been a tale of woes through most of these decades. Conceived as a special purpose vehicle to deploy the oil and gas resources accruing from the Niger Delta to fast-track development in the area, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) may be described as a colossal failure so far. And rightly so.
Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta area has remained the very symbol of the metaphor of oil wealth as ill omen for oil producing countries.
Since oil and gas were found in commercial quantities in this bracken water creeks from whence the pan-African River Niger empties into the Atlantic ocean, what ordinarily would have been termed good fortune has become a source of sorrow and death.
The more the quantity of the black gold mined in this region, the more the woes of the people.
For more than 60 years of oil exploration in Nigeria which takes place largely in the Niger Delta, the region which to ought have transformed into some sort of paradise on earth has degraded enormously and become derelict.
Oil exploration has left the place an environmental wasteland with the rich aquatic life, and the sauna and fauna of the ecosystem damaged. Fishing, a major preoccupation of the people is no longer viable as a result of vastly polluted waters. Cropping too is no more feasible having been hampered by persistent oil spills.
Worse still, the International Oil Companies have acted most irresponsibly, laying out no concrete plan to holistically develop the oil-bearing areas.
The Federal Government on the other hand, was merely interested in royalties and rent. The result over the years, is that the Niger Delta areas of Nigeria became a huge eyesore, the shame of a nation.
By 2001 when NDDC was created, the people of the zone had become restive as conditions of living had become nigh unbearable. Something needed to be done urgently to save the impending implosion. Among the immediate palliative measures designed by the government of the day was the NDDC. A Ministry of Niger Delta was to follow, among other initiatives like OMPADEC (Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission.)
About 20 years on, the impact of these agencies have remained minimal. For instance, the East-West road, the flagship highway which leads to the heart of the oil zone has remained uncompleted for nearly one decade.
Huge sums allocated to these special vehicle agencies end up in private pockets, with hardly anything to show for it.
It is this ugly scenario that led to the on-going special interest on NDDC by the presidency. The foul air wafting out of this Commission hard become too strong to be ignored.
In November 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari ordered a forensic audit to be carried out on NDDC. The audit was to review all the financial transactions of the body since inception. The report was submitted mid- August and the result as expected, is unpalatable; to put it mildly.
Snippets from the report show that about 13,777 projects awarded since the take off of the Commission were liable to have been compromised. The report shows that NDDC maintains about 362 bank accounts. But most remarkable is that NDDC has reportedly received N6 trillion but there’s little to show for it.
Even as the audit went on for about two years, interim managements put in place only showcased the bazaar that the commission has become. Senate probe of their activities brought up most unpalatable outcomes. The entire nation was left aghast.
Now that President Muhammadu Buhari has received the audit report, there a hint of criminal investigation to be carried out on the report.
However, this newspaper is of the opinion that it is time to set the NDDC back on the path of serious productivity. So much time and grounds have been lost.
We urge the president to make haste to inaugurate the NDDC board which he had nominated and which the senate had approved since November 5, 2021. There seems to be a consensus among stakeholders that this board would do the best by the people of the Niger Delta.
While we commend President Buhari for the courage to initiate this deep-reaching audit, we urge him to return the NDDC to life, by inaugurating its board.
