Cash and Cow at NDDC
By Sam Omatseye

Right from its inception, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) has carried the image of a cash cow. Many want the cash, but they do not care if the cow breathes or dies. It came to earth to cure the ills of the Niger Delta region, a perennial victim of primeval exploitations by a political-military elite as well as conquering oil companies.

Some have described it as an intervention agency to build infrastructure, elevate the welfare of the people, give them schools and health centres. It was set up to save the people. From its outset, perceptive analysts have seen it as a means of salving the conscience of a primitive class, rippling with greed and violence against the region.

But after many years, the impression has sunk that the same people who established it have hijacked it. Rather than heal the people, it is a temptation to personal glory by the same corps of political and military elite. So the cow has continued to explode with cash, while the body rots. This calls to mind what Tom Paine, a pamphleteer of the American revolution, wrote in reaction to Edmund Burke, who condemned the French Revolution. He said Burke loved the feathers but forgot that the bird was dying. Our leaders have lusted after NDDC money, but forget that the body is dying for failing to fulfil its promise.

That was what came to mind when the Federal Government set up a panel under Oronsaye to look into the troubles of the commission. I say it is high time for such a body. I also say that I hope it is not headed towards, one, a witch-hunt; or two, a mere waste of time and resources that would leave the commission how it met it. Either destiny is fatal.

Which means that the way it is presently run and constituted will not heal the sick, shelter the poor, enlighten the simple, feed the hungry and bring pride to the people of the region. The basic contradiction of the NDDC is that it was set up to save the region from the military-political elite, but it is suffocating under the same people. If this very oddity is not addressed, then the panel is a waste of national resources.

Nothing demonstrates this more than the battle between the management under Chibuzor Ugwoha and the board under retired Air Vice Marshal Larry Koinyan. Ugwoha is a technocrat from corporate Nigeria, while Koinyan grew out of the gene of military-political aberration of our history. The clash between them is a replay of the historic clash, between those who believe in institution and individual. Sometimes, the boundaries are not so tight, and innocence is hard to establish. But arbiters of the law can unwind the riddle.

Right from day one, the NDDC has frustrated its technocrat CEOs. The reason is that the board members are politicians who see it as their stepping stone to power. Most of them want to be governors. So Omene, the first managing director who came from Shell, suffered under his board. The boards often are politicians who want to develop themselves rather than the region. Look at the list of some of the helmsmen of the place, Onyema Ugochukwu, Emmanuel Agwariavwodo, Sam Edem et al. They all were embroiled in gubernatorial politics. Ugochukwu in Abia, Agwariavwodo in Delta, Edem of the “juju” fame” in Akwa Ibom. In some cases where politicians made it to the management, it has been troubling. Pastor PZ Aganighan also has been eyeing the job of Delta governor. Timi Alaibe expressed interest in Bayelsa’s top job.

If politicians are on the board and sometimes find themselves in management, how will the cash not be more important than the cow? That has been the cry of Ugwoha: The board wants to run the place as though they are the management. The Public Procurement Act of 2007 is regarded as the extant law in sync with civil service regulations.

The board under Koinyan wants the old rules within the books and not the wider law of the country. On the transfer of accounts, it was argued that it needed board resolution. The NDDC MD says he transferred it from a failing bank, namely the Union Bank, to a virile First Bank, and it is not a personal account, and it is not interest-yielding. The panel should investigate that. If Ugwoha is right, he gets a thumbs up. If not, then his integrity is impugned. The issue of board resolution is thorny. It is the accountant-general’s approval that is required in all MDAs in the country, why would the NDDC be an exception?. The panel ought to clarify this. Huge contracts have to pass either through the tenders’ board and the BPE. We want clarifications too.

The panel ought to look at how the board members were appointed. The charge is commonplace that the board members spent less time discussing the challenges of the regions. Rather they concentrated on their welfare and continually followed the NDDC money. Is Ugwoha’s unwillingness to cooperate with the politician-board members at the root of the rumpus?

Shall we also look at ethnic rivalry? Some have charged that it is actually an ethnic war in favour of a particular group that is increasingly seeing itself as synonymous with Niger Delta. They want Ugwoha removed to replace him with an Ijaw man or someone pliant to an Ijaw clique. Niger Delta is about the Ijaw, it is also about the Urhobo, the Ikwere, the Itsekiri, the Ogoni, Adoni, etc. President Jonathan should note this subterranean agony seething in Niger Delta.

The panel should also look at the possibility of forbidding politicians from playing any roles in the board and management of the NDDC. It is an emergency body, not a place to enrich idle politicians or jobbers. The Niger Delta elite have been accused of not working but fattening themselves. They are libertines of indolence. The village elite who takes money from the oil firms but spend it on cars, women and liquor instead of on behalf of the communities. The political elite cavort in mansions, wining and womanising. The military has cohabited with them. If the NDDC is an emergency body, what is this tribe of men doing as board members?

They are the aristocrats of the NDDC. They believe the Niger Delta money belongs to them. They have no talents, not vision, no moral standing, no wisdom. They are artificial aristocrats. What we want are what philosophers call natural aristocrats, as Thomas Jefferson described them in his letter to his counterfoil, the great John Adams. “…there is a natural aristocracy among men,” he wrote, “the grounds of this are virtue and talents.” Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, was the first to use the phrase “natural aristocracy.” But the idea comes down from Plato who believes that the cupbearers of change and progress should be good and wise men. And they should lead other mortals.

We don’t have virtue or talent on the board. A man like Koinyan whose last outing was as DFRRI boss in the IBB years makes me wonder who appointed him to the board. DFRRI was meant to do the same kind of job NDDC is expected to do. But DFFRI was a signpost of colossal failure and incompetence under Koinyan. Hardly any project materialised. As my friend Louis Odion wrote at his appointment, the projects are relics either overgrown with weeds or are rumps that benefit no mortal.

Oronsaye has a big task ahead. The cow should not be allowed to bleed to death.

http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/columnist/monday/sam-omatseye/15910-cash-and-cow-at-nddc.html

Well, we know the NDDC is one of the biggest Maga/bodies/scam in Africa.

NDDC (formerly OMPADEC) was not established to serve Niger Delta people, that is just the cover up, it was established to legally and covertly bribe and siphon oil money into the pockets if a few elite sons and daughters of the Niger Delta.

Even President Goodluck was a former director of OMPADEC a job that liberated him from the penury of a Nigerian lecturers job; I don't blame the man at all, just saying.

The Niger Delta people are in a catch 22 position, on one hand they are being fucccked brutally by the oil companies in collusion with Nigerian Federal Elites while on the other hand their so called local leaders are royally bleeping them with no mercy in collusion with the same FG and oil companies they were appointed to counter.

It is a sad situation. A typical "Nigerian politics" story.

I believe it is high time the militants knew where to direct their anger. Get the godamn members of the NDDC to execute contracts or they be executed. What the hell!

another lovely and truthful write-up by SAM