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The Federal Government is tinkering with a new master plan for the Niger Delta, to foster peace, end lingering militancy and shore up Nigeria’s oil production in the region.
The new Chairman of the NDDC board, Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba (SAN), who broke this news during an interview with journalists in Calabar, after his inauguration on Friday, said, “before this is done, we would need to carry out a number of audits— an audit of our systems, processes, projects, as well as, that of our personnel, so we can have a true picture of not only the governance systems, but also a true picture of our obligations.”
Ndoma-Egba said there was a master plan that was drawn up before, which was a 15-year plan. It’s been more than 10 years since it was drawn up, so it is either a new plan was done or the old one is revalidated.
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The former Senate leader pointed out that, “part of the problem has been that the NDDC is budgeted for on a yearly basis, which won’t work. We have to have a long-term to say this is what we want to see out of the Niger Delta and then, you use the yearly budget to achieve that ultimate goal. Those are some of the things we intend to set out to do.”
He gave the assurance that uncompleted projects would be captured in the project audit, as this would determine the number of projects, the nature of the projects, and the status of each project.
“Right now, NDDC has over 9, 000 contracts, which is unwieldy. No matter the capacity of an organisation, I doubt if you have capacity to properly execute 9, 000 contracts. Some of those contracts are moribund, some are dead, and some are non-existent.”
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