The former Chairman of the Senate Committee on Communication, Chief Sylvester Anyanwu has denied that members of his committee were induced not to clear the President’s nominees to the Board of the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC.
In an exclusive telephone conversation with The Abuja Inquirer last Thursday, Senator Anyanwu said “those allegations that my committee members and I were bribed to deny or delay clearance for the nominees to the board of the NCC are false. Nobody can bribe me. The Interim NCC management led by the Acting Executive Vice Chairman (Engr. Bashir Gwandu) does not have access to the amount being quoted. The young man couldn’t approve any contract or sign NCC cheque throughout Ndukwe’s tenure and the Budget of NCC for this year has not even been approved, so where will he get the money from? It’s all rubbish talk and they know it.”
It will be recalled that penultimate week; the Senate Committee on Communication was dissolved by the Senate president, David Mark, because he said they did a shoddy job of the screening of the nominees for the NCC Board.
The committee, it was alleged in a paid advertorial, had been induced not to clear the nominees by the Interim Management of the NCC. Monies as high as N200 and N250 million were alleged to have been given to the Senate committee members. However, the Senate went ahead to clear the nominees when the dissolved committee refused to clear them. Since then, there have been calls for a probe of the entire episode. “These allegations are false”, Sen. Anyanwu insists.
The Abuja Inquirer was reliably informed that some members of the Senate Committee were reluctant to clear the nominees for a number of reasons. In the main, the composition of the nominees violated the spirit of law establishing the Commission. The law says there will be nine commissioners, three of whom will be Executive Commissioners including the Chief Executive, while the remaining six will come from Nigeria’s six Geo-Political Zones. As it stands today, the South-South Zone has no nominee as part of the non-executive, while the North Central Zone has two on the Board, namely, Mr. Bayo Atoyebi from Kwara and Mr. Peter Igoh, from Benue, the new Chairman.
A member of the committee who opted to remain anonymous, told The Abuja Inquirer, that Mr. Igoh and the Senate President are very close associates and that it was him who nominated Mr. Igoh and was concerned that he may not be cleared. We were told, even though we couldn’t independently confirm it, that David Mark had threatened to dissolve the Committee if they didn’t clear the nominees with dispatch. “It’s all a game,” said the Senator “in the past, the Senate President could have asked us to go and repeat the exercise more conclusively. He didn’t. Why? Because the Senate President had a vested interest.”
He added: “These allegations of bribery are totally unfounded. Let them name the Senator or Senators who collected the money. It is simply designed to blackmail those who chose to be guided by their conscience”. The management of NCC didn’t have the sums of money they are calling to give out as bribe. Every body knows that. Ernest Ndukwe ran a one man show when he was the CEO. He almost single handedly awarded all the contracts. Those doing business with NCC know that”.
Sen. Anyanwu, the erstwhile chairman of the Communications Committee told The Abuja Inquirer that his members were trying to do a thorough job. Said he: “The list of nominees came in on a Thursday; we scheduled the screening for Monday. When we assembled, there were no security reports, no papers from the security agencies like Police, EFCC, SSS, ICPC etc, so we had to wait. Even the designated Chairman (Mr. Peter Igoh) didn’t even know he had been nominated. Ask him. We wanted to be thorough.”
Some senate sources informed us that Mr. Ndukwe was very particular that Mr. Juwah succeeds him because he couldn’t trust those within the system to tidy the mess he had left behind. “All the contracts to supply bandwidth connections to schools and colleges for which hundreds of millions of Naira had been paid were never completely executed and we were going to investigate it. Major broadband projects were all executed in secret under Ndukwe. These contracts were never really completed, but large sums of money had been paid out by NCC under Ndukwe”.
Last weekend, a manager in the NCC who requested not to be named, said the Commission never bribed any Senator. Said he: “If they have any proof to the contrary, let them come forward with it. If you are looking for three prudent members of the management of NCC surely Gwandu will be one of them. He is very thorough, ask anybody. I can tell you that he has neither initiated a contract nor held even one tenders committee meeting to approve contracts when he was the Acting EVC, you can go and find out. I wonder how he could have generated 250Million to give as bribe. This faceless group knows they are lying.”

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