A TALE OF TWO NDDC BOARDS

· Josef Omorortionmwan canvasses inauguration of the first confirmed board of the agency

· Charles Dickens (1812-1870) would easily have reminded us that these are the best of times; and the worst of times. It is the age of hope and the age of despair. It is the age of belief and the age of incredulity.

· We perhaps do not need Dicken’s oxymorons to remind us that we have always believed that when an organisation no longer knows what to do, it begins to grapple with everything. That is when the loss of one genuine purpose leads to the pursuit of a dozen pseudo purposes. That’s where our current administration is.

· In their wisdom, the framers of our Constitution had decided that government cannot spend any amount outside the appropriation for any given year. Any revenue or expenditure that comes after the passage and approval of the Appropriation Act can only be admitted through supplementary appropriation of the National Assembly.

· This was the basis on which the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, declared the Excess Crude Account illegal and unconstitutional, and ordered its closure while the balance thereof should be transferred to the Federation Account from where it would be distributed to the Federating Units.

· It has been convenient for the federal government to turn a deaf ear to this ruling. Rather, the illegal Excess Crude Account has remained a veritable source of slush funds for all its illegal operations.

· Truly, Nigeria has been growing in the negative. For the first time, we saw an administration that took its time and thoroughly wasted close to one year before appointing Ministers.

· This would have been impossible in the past when political parties held sway. In those days, as the President was being sworn in, the ruling party quickly followed with the list of Ministerial nominees and nominees for Board appointment. This was done because the party depended on the check-off from their salaries to run the party.

· The states are following suit. It is not unusual now for some state governors to run their states for some two years as sole administrators before thinking of appointing their executive councils.

· In the first tenure of President Buhari’s administration, a list of nominees for board appointments was presented to him. He was so busy that he couldn’t touch the list. Toward the end of this tenure, appointment letters were issued to the people. But behold, many of the appointees were already dead. That’s what we call post-humous board appointments! What an innovation!

· This has permeated many states. In some cases, not only have the governors refused to appoint boards, they have killed the boards outright!

· President Buhari so loved the people of the Niger Delta Region that he gave the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) two boards duly cleared and confirmed by the Senate, awaiting inauguration.

· We have maintained that the best time to do anything about the list submitted to the Senate for confirmation is before the Senate Committee reports out the measure. Once the nominees have been reported out of the Committee and the Senate confirmation is obtained, the President has no choice but to inaugurate the board.

· Again, let it be said that the President could inaugurate the board in the morning and dissolve it in the evening of the same day if he has enough reason to do so. But inaugurate the board, he must!

· After the first board was cleared by the Senate, we began to await inauguration. Suddenly, we started hearing that the President had some reservations about the confirmed list.

· What first sounded like a rumour soon became rife when a second list was submitted to the Senate.

· At first, we thought this must be a demonstration of the President’s abundant love for the people – a question of having two lists so that if anything happened to one, the other could come readily handy for swearing-in. We were wrong.

· The same Senate still went ahead to screen and confirm the second list. We hear that the people of Warri have since dragged government to court claiming that the second list poses a height of injustice as they are the right people to produce the Chairman of the NDDC Board.

· As we begin to disengage from the current dispensation, what does the Ninth Senate want to be remembered for? Surely, it does not want to be called a rubber-stamp. But what better name does anyone have for a Senate that catches cold each time the President sneezes? And how else do you regard a Senate that would rather rush into confirming a second list instead of asking the President what he has done with the first confirmation? For us, this is the biggest Rubber-Stamp ever!

· These confirmations don’t come easy. Once you become a nominee for Senate confirmation, you are reminded of the old aphorism that there is no free lunch even in Freetown. You must immediately cough out money to make close to a thousand copies of your credentials. You must leave your cocoa farm and travel to and fro Abuja more than 20 times in the process of the confirmation. In this age of kidnap, you must seek some loan for the exorbitant airfare, plus some other incidentals.

· Most importantly, these senators do not know the permanent injury they inflict on the nominees in the process.

· For instance, when the first NDDC Board was cleared and confirmed by the Senate but they were not sworn in before another list arrived at the Senate, the impression out there was that some of the nominees on the first board must be a bunch of criminals, except that their criminal tendencies were not discovered at the time of clearance. In this political age, opponents can even use that against them.

· This is one way of explaining why Senator Ifeanyi Ararume is currently in court with the federal government. This no-nonsense senator was quietly sitting on his own when he got a letter that he had been nominated as Chairman of the new NNPC Board.

· He went for Senate confirmation and was cleared only to be dropped later. Maybe someone else had out-priced him.

· Staring the federal government on the face are two screened and Senate confirmed boards – one without blemish and the other in court. Worse still, the NDDC is being run by an illegal Interim Management Team.

· In all this, the federal government has only one safety valve out of the current entanglement – quickly inaugurate the first confirmed board!

· Omorortionmwan writes from Canada