Regions, citizens languish amid proliferation of ‘political’ SPVs

Designed as a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) to ramp up the development of the Niger Delta region that is defaced and devalued by oil exploitation activities, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) signposts how not to develop a region. Its cousin in the North – the North-East Development Commission (NEDC) – is also in the throes of underperformance. Both commissions allegedly violate procurement laws, neck-deep in the ills of inflating contracts, award of non-existent contracts, as well as being proficient in contract splitting. Given this ugly precedence, the lack of commensurate value for money spent, and the attendant massive infrastructure deficit etc, President Bola Tinubu’s assent to bills establishing the North-West Development Commission (NEDC), and the South-East Development Commission (SEDC), leaves a sour taste in the mouth, rather than elicit cheers. MUYIWA ADEYEMI, SEYE OLUMIDE, LAWRENCE NJOKU, ANN GODWIN, and RAUF OYEWOLE, report on the proliferation of development commissions without development, which many say bodes the country no good.

Sandra Kenneth, a resident of Udoada, in Ahoada West Local Council of Rivers State, is livid that her kith and kin have been subjected to untold hardship as they go through the Mbiama-Okarki-Udoada Road, which was abandoned by the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC).

The 25-kilometer road, which was awarded by the interventionist agency in 2004, is yet to be completed 20 years later, thereby leaving over nine communities in the state to access their homes through the Bayelsa State route.

The effect of the bad road also impacts the peoples’ wellbeing since there is no swift access to primary healthcare centres. No thanks to the deplorable condition of the road.

According to her: “Those who are sick, especially pregnant women, are facing serious challenges getting medical care. Also, there is no security as the only available police post is in Akinima Community, which is quite far from Udoada.”

For Felix Ehuba, who resides in Akinima: “When a crime is committed, or crisis breaks out and we call on the police to come to our rescue; it takes them quite some time to get here because there is no access road, you can only come here by motorcycle. There is also no potable water, and you can’t imagine what we pass through here. How can you believe that a 25-kilometre road started 20 years ago has not been completed, despite the huge resources allocated to NDDC every year?” he asked rhetorically.

Samuel Ekuohi, one of the contractors handling the project disclosed that funding forms a major part of challenges besetting the NDDC, and stalling the completion of thousands of projects started in the South-South.

The scenario with people in the North-East is not different from their colleagues in the South South. The North-East Development Commission (NEDC) established by the Federal Government, in 2017, was to, among others, rebuild infrastructure and institutions destroyed by Boko Haram insurgents in Borno, Adamawa, Bauchi, Taraba, Gombe, and Yobe states.

However, despite its mandate to revitalise the North-East affected by insurgency, poverty, and environmental challenges, the NEDC has consistently struggled to find the right development template, and hence, has also been navigating a complex maze, with each turn of the process presenting an even more difficult challenge. Somehow, allegations of mismanagement of resources and others are beginning to trail the agency.

In addition to corruption allegations, it has also faced criticism for the slow progress of work, and the people’s verdict about its achievements thus far has been that of disappointment.

Like NDDC, like NEDC
AMID the poor verdict passed by the people, both the NDDC and NEDC are complaining of paucity of funds. They are also accusing the Federal Government and member-states of not contributing certain percentages of their income to the agencies as specified by the law establishing them.

For instance, the NDDC Act states clearly how the commission shall be funded. Section 14(2) provides: “The Federal Government shall pay the equivalent of 15 per cent of the total monthly allocation due to the member states of the commission from the Federation Account, this being the contribution of the Federal Government to the commission; three per cent of the total annual budget of any oil-producing company operating onshore and offshore in the Niger Delta area, including gas processing companies; 50 per cent of monies due to member-states of the commission from the ecological fund…” and other sources such as grants and loans.

Apart from the Federal Government, which has been accused of not complying with the provisions of the NDDC Act, some oil companies have also not been paying the three per cent of their annual budget as required by law. The NDDC alleged that they deducted the first charges before calculating the three per cent from the balance.

It was gathered that the NDDC is not only owed about N2 trillion, but the interventionist agency is hugely indebted to its various contractors to the tune of over N1.3 trillion.

Interestingly, since its establishment, the NDDC has carefully curated for itself, a diverse range of identities. For some, what they see is the image of a conduit pipe where any government in power dispenses favour to the political elite, while to others, it is something akin to the Theatre of the Absurd, where all shades of absurdities thrive.

And like the absurd theatre that Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Eugene Ionesco were leading lights, the NDDC has since its inception been struggling vainly to effectively and transparently realise the role for which it was set up to play.

Not many are unfamiliar with the high drama that played out on July 20, 2020, in one of the hearing rooms of the House of Representatives, when the then Acting Managing Director of the agency, Prof. Kemebradikumo Daniel Pondei, “lost consciousness” while being grilled by the House Committee on NDDC over alleged misappropriation of funds.

On that fateful day, Pondei blacked out during a corruption hearing, after a member of the panel raised questions about N641 million paid to Clear Point Communications, and N536 million also paid out to another company for a phoney campaign tagged, “Save Lives in the Niger Delta.”

Established as a novel agency in the year 2000, with the sole mandate of developing the oil-rich Niger Delta, via training and educating youths of the oil-rich region to curb hostilities and militancy while developing key infrastructure to promote economic diversification and productivity, it has thus far grossly under-deliver on this mandate. In its stead, it has done excellently well in generating tonnes of controversies, in addition to serving as a cesspool for alleged corrupt practices.

As a testament to its failure to abate underdevelopment, but constantly satisfy politicians’ unending appetite for embezzlement of funds, thousands of projects that it has initiated over the years have remained uncompleted, and dot every part of the South-South zone.

Calls by public-spirited groups and individuals for the commission to be accountable have been ceaseless, but for obvious reasons (especially the lack of political will by governments to do right) the pillaging of resources in the commission has been unending.

Only recently, former President Goodluck Jonathan, at the Niger Delta Stakeholders Summit, in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, blamed the political class for holding the agency by the jugular and slowing its impact on the people of the region.

Jonathan, who said that the NDDC as an interventionist agency was birthed to bring development closer to the people, appealed to the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, to urge other politicians to allow the agency to deliver on its mandate without interference.

“Politicians should not overstress NDDC to the detriment of the people,” said Jonathan, adding: “Akpabio is here, and he is the most senior politician in this summit. So, I urge him to work with other politicians to ensure that the NDDC is not subjected to so much stress by politicians.”

A former governor from the South-South zone, Donald Duke, who spoke on behalf of other former colleagues, urged the NDDC management not to yield to pressures from politicians, but to focus on activities and programmes that will uplift the lives of the people.

Jonathan’s plea was earlier accentuated by the commission when it, in a statement by its spokesperson, Charles Odili, in June 2020, alleged that Senator Peter Nwaoboshi, used 11 companies as fronts to secure for himself, N3.6 billion worth of contracts in September 2016.

Odili’s statement added that the alleged fraud involving Nwaoboshi, who represented Delta North District, Delta State was the “biggest single case of looting of the Commission’s resources.”

In all of these, the sheer lack of political will to stem corruption in the interventionist agency is further gleaned from the fact that President Muhammadu Buhari, left office in 2023 without implementing the report of the NDDC forensic audit after the Federal Government promised that it would apply the law to remedy the deficiencies outlined in the forensic audit, including the initiation of criminal investigation, prosecution, recovery of funds not properly utilised for the public purposes for which they were meant for.

The forensic audit report released in 2020 found that the NDDC received over N6 trillion between 2001 and 2019 with very little to show for the amount. It detailed evidence of grand corruption, brazen fraud, and impunity.
It also uncovered 13,000 abandoned projects, most of which the contract sums were fully, or partially paid for. The agency had 362 bank accounts that according to former Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Godswill Akpabio, said lacked proper reconciliation.

Despite not being around for as long as the NDDC has been, the NEDC is equally hamstrung by challenges. This explains why on July 12, President Bola Tinubu approved the agency to source an N1 trillion loan to fund some of its capital projects in the region.

The Act establishing the NEDC states that in each financial year, an appropriation of at least 10 per cent of annual statutory allocations due to the member-states of the commission from the Federation Account will go to the commission as the contribution of the Federal Government to it, and “a sum of at least 10 per cent of the Ecological Fund annually for a period of 10 years; a sum equivalent to three per cent of the annual VAT collection as first line charge, to accrue to the commission for a period of 10 years, notwithstanding the provisions of any other law; such money as may be granted, lent to, or deposited with the commission by the federal or a state government, or any other body or institution whether local or foreign; money raised for the commission by way of gifts.”

Sadly, the non-compliance of both the federal government and member-states to the Act establishing the agency has led to the current shopping for N31 trillion to implement its 10-year Development Masterplan.

But despite the NDDC and NEDC complaints of insufficient funding to carry out their responsibilities, both are allegedly deficient in accountability and proper management of resources, and many see them as corrupt entities.

This perhaps explains why the leader of the concerned North East Front (NEF), Dr Garus Gololo, is calling for the forensic audit of the over N3 trillion that NEDC has received since 2017, but with little to show for it.

He said: “My demand is for them to give an account of all the funding amounting to N3 trillion since its establishment by law, in 2017 till date. We need the financial record published, or we need a public presentation of the expenditure as it is done in the NDDC. It is also important for the Federal Government of Nigeria to set up an investigative committee to come up with a report of what these people are doing.”

NEDC is developing its region
Amid this allegation, the Head of Corporate Affairs of NEDC, Abba Musa told The Guardian that the agency has been very prudent in managing its resources. He stated that its method of awarding contracts has been very transparent.

According to him: “We don’t pay contractors in parts; we award contracts and the contractor source for funds to execute it, and we make payment after execution. This money is paid directly from our account with the Federal Government.”

Musa said that the NEDC has been focused on its core mandate, which includes, “sustainable growth, rehabilitation, resettlement, rebuilding, reconciliation, reactivation, replacement, reconstruction, renewal, regeneration, redevelopment, and reconciliation.”

He disclosed further: “Since the inception of the commission, there is no sector that we have not touched. We don’t just go to a community and execute projects; we allow the communities to state their needs and we intervene. That is what we call Demand Driven Projects (DPP).

“When we came on board, we first initiated what we called Rapid Response Intervention (RRI) projects. The commission allocated two projects to all the 112 local government areas of the North East states. We asked each LGA of their pressing needs, they identified their various needs and we executed two projects at each LGA at the cost of N50 million. If the N50 million is multiplied by 112 LGAs, that is N5.6 billion. That was in 2020.

“In education, we have model schools in all the 18 senatorial districts of the region. The NEDC has constructed 3,500 housing units in all six member-states. In Borno State, we have 1,000 housing units, in Bauchi, Gombe, Adamawa, Taraba, and Yobe states, there are 500 units in each state.

“We have successfully returned hundreds of thousands of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to their rebuilt communities in Borno State. In our humanitarian interventions, as of last year, we have reached over 500,000 households for relief materials across the region.”

However, while the NEDC is shopping for N31 trillion to achieve its master plan, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of BudgIT, Oluseun Onigbinde, berated the commission for spending N126 billion on overhead.

Onigbinde on his X handle said: “NEDC, which was just created in the last administration, already has a personnel cost allocation of N126 billion, six times the personnel cost of an average federal university, is this how to bring development to North-East?

In July 2023, the House of Representatives called for the probe of the NEDC over alleged mismanagement of N100 billion. The resolution of the House was a sequel to a motion sponsored by Ndudi Elumelu, Minority Leader of the House, on Thursday.

While moving his motion, Elumelu said that the N100 billion given to the commission by the Federal Government has “vanished” with nothing to show for it.

The Delta State-born lawmaker accused the Managing Director of NEDC, Mohammed Alkali of awarding non-existent contracts, alleging: “The N100 billion so far disbursed to the commission by the Federal Government is said to have vanished under a year without any visible impact on the refugees, nor any infrastructural development credited to the name of the commission in the whole of the North-East.

“The corrupt practices include high-handedness by the managing director, Mohammed Goni Alkali, over inflation of contracts, awards of non-existent contracts, massive contract splitting, and flagrant disregard for the procurement laws in the award of contracts,” Elumelu said.

As Elumelu trolled Alkali, some Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have threatened to drag the leadership of NEDC to the EFCC and the ICPC over the alleged mismanagement of N146.19 billion.

Executive chairman of PATAI, Francis Bassey, and AITA President, Aminu Majidadi, explained that core allegations levelled against the NEDC border on corruption, financial misappropriation, and abuse of office, claiming that the N146.19 billion budgetary allocation to the commission was paid in full for uncompleted, or abandoned projects.

But the NEDC spokesman, Abba Musa, in reacting to these allegations, described them as baseless, saying: “You and I know that in this regime, it is not possible to mismanage over N146 billion, and nothing will happen. The process itself will not make it possible.”

A new NDDC with open-door policy
For those describing the NDDC as a cesspool of corruption, the managing director of the agency, Dr Samuel Ogbuku, said that negative narratives about NDDC are changing because of the open door policies put in place, its ability to meet the expectations of the people, and an improved relationship between the people and the agency.

Ogbuku said: “It is unmet expectations that breed frustration. So, you ask yourself, what is the real expectation of our people? They expect to see us operate an open-door policy… Since we came in, we decided to run an open-door policy where we try as much as possible to meet and attend to their needs.

He expressed gratitude for the N1.9 budgetary consideration, and access to a soft loan of N1 trillion approved by President Bola Tinubu, to enable the agency to complete more projects and bring the desired development to the region.

Me too syndrome: For politics or devt?
LAST Tuesday, President Tinubu assented to the North-West Development Commission (Establishment) Bill, 2024, and the South-East Development Commission (Establishment) Bill, 2023.

The bills, according to presidential spokesman, Ajuri Ngelale, were signed into laws to accelerate development across geo-political zones in the country.

“The North-West Development Commission is set up to facilitate the reconstruction of roads, houses, and business premises destroyed by multidimensional crisis, as well as tackle poverty, literacy level, ecological problems, and any other related environmental or development challenges in North-West states,” Ngelale said, adding: “In addition, the South-East Development Commission is established to ensure the reconstruction and rehabilitation of roads, houses, and other infrastructural damages suffered by the zone, as well as tackle ecological problems, and other related environmental or developmental challenges in South-East states.”

But with the lack-lustre performance of the NDDC and NEDC, and their failure to engender development, many think the president’s action negates development.

Speaking on the plethora of development commissions but without development in the country, a public affairs analyst, Mr Jide Ojo, said that the quest for development commissions by the geo-political zones reflects the failure of the National Development Plan.

He said: “The attempt by the geo-political zones to have an interventionist agency like the NDDC is borne out of the failure of our National Development Plan. I saw this coming. If our National Development Plan were to be working, we would have sufficient Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) to take care of the development needs of the entire country, irrespective of the geo-political zone. But because many of these MDAs have failed, each of the geopolitical zones is looking at how to have an interventionist agency to shore up the development needs of their zones.

“If the Ministry of Works were to be optimal in its performance and there were good roads across the country why would we need an NDDC, NEDC, or any other development commission for that matter? If the Ministry of Health were working optimally, why would we need another interventionist that will set up primary healthcare centres, or general hospitals here and there?

“Secondly, what is the scorecard of even the existing interventionist agencies? I think NEDC had its first budget in 2018. The NDDC has been in existence since 2000, yet its scorecard is still abysmal. If you go to the nine states of the Niger Delta today, can you say that there is a sufficient presence of governance in the areas despite the Presidential Amnesty Programme, Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, the NDDC, and 13 per cent derivation fund?

“It is a very disingenuous way to approach development to believe that every zone must have its development commission for it to develop. No, if you want to form a regional government, let us dissolve the states into six geo-political zones and thereby spark competition among these regions. We cannot have MDAs, 36 states, and then all these interventionist agencies, many of which are serving as conduit pipes for corruption. A senator from Niger Delta was alleged to have 300 contracts from NDDC, 120 of those contracts was fully paid for, but the man didn’t execute anything. So, for how long would we continue to have these drain pipes in the name of development commissions?

“For me, the quest is not desirable at all. I am not in support of the establishment of a development commission across the geo-political zones, rather, let us strengthen the existing MDAs financially, administratively, and policy-wise so that they can perform optimally,” Ojo noted.

A senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science, University of Lagos, Dr Emmanuel Onah, told The Guardian that the struggle for the establishment of a development commission by various zones is a mark of the insincerity of the country’s leaders about the quest for development.

He said: “At the political end, you will see that what is also playing out is the kind of politics that we are playing in the country, that is politics where nobody is concerned with development, but using the concern for development as an instrument of corruption. Everybody seems to be thinking that if there is a commission in their zone, their leaders are going to have the opportunity to have some money from contracts, appointments, and all that and that their zones should not be left out. So, what they are fighting for is not development for their zones, they are fighting for the opportunity for appointments, contracts, and all that. So, the development issue is not the concern here, the concern is politics of corruption and aggrandisement.”