By Ben Eguzozie
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Contractors besiege board
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Onochie, board chairperson, begs for time
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After $40bn or N15trn in 20yrs, not a Marshall Plan
The new board of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) chaired by former presidential aide, Lauretta Onochie, appears heavily bogged down by legacy debts of the commission and it is being suggested that it is massively distracted and may not be able to steer the commission’s activities to bring it back to the original foundational purpose it was established.
Years of failure to achieve significant changes in the region following decades of neglect by the federal government despite being responsible for producing the crude oil that earns the country at least 80 percent of the foreign exchange that oils the economy, have exposed the massive corruption that has distorted the main purpose of the commission’s establishment.
Many had thought that the NDDC would act in the form of the US-style Marshall Plan introduced after World War II, when it was established in 2000 to bring major economic transformations of the Niger Delta region, but lack of clear focus, massive corruption and lack of sincerity on the part of the federal government and appointees sent to midwife the commission, have meant that the region is today left in a worse state unbefitting of an oil producing region.
On the back of the commission’s legacy debts, scores of contractors who said they have executed various types of jobs for the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) in recent years have besieged its governing board in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, over heaps of unpaid contract bills running into approximately N3 trillion.
They have now organised themselves into an association, the NDDC Contractors Association, to ventilate their frustrations and possibly get heard by the government quango.
Joe Adia, chairman of the NDDC contractors group, said their members constituted “critical stakeholders in the development of Nigeria’s oil-rich region”.
But he regretted that they have had a “rough time” getting paid for jobs they have executed by the commission, which has for two decades been trailed by stories of graft and more graft, with the mess traced to phoney contracts and phantom payments for jobs often not executed.
Ibitoye Abosede, director of corporate affairs at NDDC could not tell Business A.M. the exact amount the commission owes its contractors. He told our newspaper that he did not also know the total number of contractors doing jobs for the commission.
In November 2019, Cairo Ojougboh, the then NDDC’s executive director in charge of projects under an interim management committee, narrated to a puzzled public how the NDDC computed that it owed N3 trillion to mostly “phantom contractors” and usually paid for jobs hardly or partially executed.
Ojougboh talked of how a then serving senator was handling 300 contracts for the NDDC, with 120 of them already fully paid by the commission. He would not name the senator, neither did he say how much was already paid out to him.
The then interim management committee set up by the federal government was to help “create an enabling environment” for a forensic audit of the commission. Till date, nothing has been heard of the audit committee announced by outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari.
Concerns have continued to rise over many years about NDDC’s unenviable record of failures to accomplish its mandate listed out in October 2000, as an interventionist agency with set goal “to quicken the development of the oil-rich Niger Delta”.
Since its inception in 2000, NDDC has received at least $40 billion or N15 trillion for supposed capital projects in the oil-rich Niger Delta, yet had serially failed to get off the ground with a robust blueprint known as the Niger Delta Regional Development Master Plan. The plan’s highlights include demography, environment and hydrology, agriculture and aquaculture, with focus on economic activities, biodiversity, transport infrastructure such as roads linking up all the oil communities straddling nine states, rail line; health care outfits; rural, urban, regional planning and housing, community development, governance and capacity development.
Adia urged the NDDC board under Lauretta Onochie to take the contractors into confidence while seeking for solutions to get them paid. He assured that the contractors’ association were willing to assist the commission and get all monies owed.
Onochie, chairman of the NDDC governing board, inaugurated in January, has appealed to the contractors to be patient, as the commission was addressing the challenges delaying their outstanding payments.
She said the contractors’ support and cooperation were necessary in resolving the challenges, regretting that those of them who had completed their jobs were yet to be paid.
According to her, the commission had set up a committee to streamline the payment of all verifiable outstanding debts.
“One of the first things we did as a board when we assumed office was to look for means to address the issue of unpaid bills. Please, be patient with us. Give us a little more time to do our house cleaning. You are our partners in the development process. When I hear about the backlog of debts to contractors, I get disturbed. It is only fair that contractors who have done their jobs get paid for them. We have set up a committee to work out modalities for paying the contractors,” Onochie said.
