Former Senate Leader, Victor Ndoma Egba, has said that jettisoning the master plan of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) is the main reason the Commission may not fulfil the reasons it was established.
In an intervieww in Calabar at the weekend, the former chairman of the NDDC said although he spent two years in the Commission, he initiated programmes that could have repositioned the Commission and that the acclaimed forensic audit may not be the solution to the man-made challenges bedeviling the interventionist body.
His words: “There are several reasons and the first is that the master plan was abandoned by the people who should implement it. The master plan was the stakeholders master plan which they generated and the government and host communities. Development partners made their inputs before that plan was presented to President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2006.
“Yes, I was there for a worthwhile. My letter of appointment said I was going to be there for four years as Chairman but I was Chairman for less than two years. The point is this, not because I am affected, I am not aware if there is any board of NDDC that has served out its term.
“So if you don’t have a guarantee tenure, how do you plan? It is in your tenure that you say in first, second, third and fourth year I will do this. So the law setting up the NDDC has been observed more in breach than in compliance. Since the law has been observed more in breach than in compliance, you do not have plans.
“However, we tried to set up a Niger Delta Development Bank when I was there and the reason was simple, oil is a terminal resource and one day it will finish and the funding of NDDC comes from the federal allocation and the oil companies so there was need to begin to look beyond oil on how to fund development projects and make them survive boards and management of the NDDC.
“So we thought that if we have a regional development bank, that will handle those mega projects, it was not the matter of who was chairman or Managing Director, the mega projects would go on.
“We also had plans to ring the region with fibre optic and that took us to Sao Tome since they had surplus to get the excess, had programme to develop sports but since we left I have not heard a word of any of these programmes and all what we hear is forensic audit. You take the East West road which has been on since President Obasanjo and he left many years ago yet we are still on it.”
On the issue of PIB which generated much controversies since it was signed into an Act by President Muhammadu Buhari, the former Senate Leader laid the blame on the doorsteps of leaders of the South South for not playing their roles well.
“I am saying that if the host communities actually wanted a figure higher than three percent, there should have been some stakeholders’ engagement prior to the passage of the bill between stakeholders of the region and their legislators in the national Assembly,” he said.
