By Blessing Ibunge
A Non-Governmental Organisation, Social Development Integrated Centre (Social Action), has urged that contractors indicted in the 13, 000 abandoned projects awarded by the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) across the region be made public and prosecuted accordingly. The call was made yesterday at a town hall meeting organised by Social Action in Port Harcourt.
The Executive Director of We The People, Mr. Ken Henshaw, during his presentation on the theme “Promoting probity in the NDDC to rebuild accountability tenets and public trust”, condemned the years of covered corruption by leadership of NDDC, which he said has hindered the mandate of the commission to develop the region.
Henshaw insisted that if corrupt practices by the leaders of NDDC are criminalised, the region will feel the positive impact of the establishment of the Commission. “In the mixed of all the corruption scandals we heard at NDDC and by the way the corruption scandals did not start in 2020 or 2021, they have been there since the creation of NDDC in 2000. We have always corruption scandals involving different boards and leaders of NDDC.
“The corruption scandals this time around as reviewed partially by statement credited to former heads of the NDDC credited to the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, also reviewed at the National Assembly panel and what we heard coming out from the forensic audit report shared recently, those scandals made people to start asking that the commission should be scrapped.
“But in as much as we disagree, we cannot scrap the Niger Delta Development Commission, but we do realise the need for us to restructure that commission, reposition that Commission, reinvent that commission and redirect that Commission in such a way that it meet up with the mandate and drive the development of the region.
“You cannot reposition a panel or Commission to start living up mandate of development. We should not allow people go around with the impression that corruption is not a crime. NDDC has been running around as if corruption was not considered a crime; selling of contracts etc were not considered a crime.
“We as a region need to tell the world that we are insisting on criminalising corruption and the only way we can do that is by asking that those people who have been indicted in the National Assembly probe panel, the forensic audit report, should be prosecuted in accordance with the Law.
“It is not enough for you to say that 13, 000 projects of the NDDC had been abandoned, we need to actually see a situation those people who committed this crime are actually arrested, indicted and prosecuted in the court of law”, Comrade Henshaw insisted.
Earlier, Programme Coordinator of Social Action, Mr. Botti Isaac, disclosed that the idea behind the town hall meeting was to mobilise citizens as stakeholders voices to contribute to the debate on how to reposition the NDDC for effective and inclusive service delivery in view of the recent forensic audit report and its revalation.
Botti advised the government to begin to investigate, indict and prosecute individuals or cooperate bodies that are guilty of misappropriation of public funds, especially meant for development.
“We feel that for a while now no one is saying anything with the forensic audit report and it will be an entity point towards sanitising the NDDC. We can not restructure or reposition the NDDC without concretely looking at the recommendation of this report, without concretely looking at some of the issues flagged. There are serious allegations of corruption, contract racketeering, abandoned projects, wastage of over N3trillion on contract that never existed.
“These should be areas Government should look into and begin to call for investigation, possible prosecution and arrest culpable persons that will help send the signal that NDDC is no longer business as usual. It is a government agency that is expected to carryout intervention that will promote development in the Niger Delta, then it should live up to that responsibility and that is why we called this meeting”.
