Buhari approves recomposition of NDDC board

Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja

President Muhammadu Buhari has approved that the board of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) be recomposed and inaugurated after the forensic audit of the Commission.

According to a statement by Special Adviser to the President Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, Buhari has also directed that the Interim Management Team of the NDDC be in place till the audit is completed, and that the supervision of the Commission remain under the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs.

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The Senate on November 5 had confirmed fifteen of President Buhari’s nominees and rejected one, Dr Joy Nunieh, who was appointed by Niger Delta Minister Godswill Akpabio to head an interim management committee to oversee the forensic audit of the agency.

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on the NDDC, Peter Nwaoboshi, while presenting the report of the screening, said Nunieh from Rivers State shunned the panel’s invitation.

The Senate had also approved on November 6 the board headed by Pius Odubu, former deputy governor of Edo State, and Bernard Okumagba as Managing Director, and asked it to take over the affairs of the Commission.

President Buhari had in October ordered a forensic audit on the operations of the NDDC from 2001 to 2019 following criticisms of its operations.

Akpabio had explained that the forensic audit being carried out on the operations of agency will ensure a well-set governance structure.

He added that the audit would reveal the reason for the failure of the NDDC after 18 years of its establishment.

“The forensic audit is all-encompassing; it is about management, the projects, the quality of the deliveries,” the Minister said.

“At the end of the audit, I will expect that the governance structure will have been well-set.

”I will expect that we will now have the total number of projects and the total number of people who collected money without doing those projects.

“Above all, we would have made NDDC bankable; it is important that such an organisation should be able to approach African Export-Import Bank and bring in money and build major industries, service a lot of medium and small scale industries for employment opportunities.

“So, we plan for what I call ‘post amnesty initiatives’, where more than 3,000 youths are in amnesty now. They cannot remain in amnesty; that is why the need to have a new NDDC.

“That is the reason for the forensics, and people should not think it is targeted at anybody.

”It is to find out what went wrong and how come that people do not own any of the projects of the NDDC, because we cannot say it has been a success story,” he’d said.