Former two-term member of the House of Representatives for Ikwuano/Umuahia Constituency, Sam Onuigbo, has said that non-Northeasterners also benefit from the North East Development Commission’s (NEDC) activities and projects.

Onuigbo, who is a member of the NEDC Board representing the Southeast Zone, spoke, yesterday, in Umuahia, noting that many Nigerians resident in the Northeast, including Southeasterners, also benefit from the facilities made available by the Commission for the direct benefit of Northeast indigenes.

He recalled that NEDC was created by federal law to address challenges arising from insurgency and restiveness in the region, resettle and rehabilitate displaced persons, reconstruct damaged and dilapidated structures and empower them.

The former lawmaker lamented that Abia State still lacked a federal secretariat about 33 years after its creation, unlike other states created at the same time. He commended the renewed move to change the scenario by the President Bola Tinubu-led government.

He also acknowledged and appreciated the role Governor Alex Otti of the Labour Party (LP) has played in actualising the state’s Federal Secretariat, saying that Otti already paid compensation to the landowners for their economic crops.

On the state of projects, in his constituency, while he was a lawmaker, Onuigbo, a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), told journalists that reports he got from the team that undertook the projects’ inspections, at the weekend, to know their status, were that the projects were progressing.