Nigeria is gripped in a macabre dance in the Niger Delta
Development Commission (NDDC) where an ‘interim management committee’ is
running the agency when the nominees for the board have been screened and
confirmed for over two weeks now. This is without precedent in Nigeria or
anywhere else. And it bothers a lot of people, especially considering the
promise made by the current federal government to follow due process and the
law.
The law governing the NDDC, which is the NDDC Act of 2000, as
amended, has no provision for the appointment of an interim management
committee. No law in Nigeria provides for that situation. In fact the extant
practice is that where interim management is in office in a State
parastatal, it immediately vacates the position and ceases to exist once the
substantive management is appointed in accordance with the law governing that
parastatal or institution. In this particular instance, the NDDC Act provides
that it will be run by a board nominated by the president and screened and
confirmed by the Senate.
However, this has been followed in the breach since President
Buhari came on board as civilian president on May 29, 2015. When he came in, he
dissolved the board and created a record by appointing Mrs Ibim Semenitari from
outside the NDDC as acting managing director for close to a year. The NDDC had
no board during this period and she operated more like a sole administrator.
More so, she hails from Rivers State, which was not due to produce the managing
director in line with the rotation of offices as provided for in the law
setting up the NDDC. Expectedly, there were outcries over the appointment and
President Buhari eventually complied with the law when in 2016 he sent nominees
to the Senate for confirmation into a new NDDC board, and in line with the
rotation of offices as provided for in the law. That board, led by the former
Akwa Ibom State Deputy Governor Mr Nsima Ekere, was promptly sworn into office.
When that board was dissolved two years later, rather than follow the law,
which provides for the Executive Director of Finance and Administration to step in
and act as MD, the president appointed an acting MD in the person of Prof.
Nelson Brambaifa from Bayelsa State. That illegality reigned till August 2019
when the president dissolved the Brambaifa-interim management committee and
named a 16-member board, with Dr. Pius Odubu as Chairman and Bernard Okumagba as
MD, while asking the most senior staff in the commission to act pending the
nominees’ confirmation by the Senate. Then stepped in Mrs. Anyia Akwagaga, a
director in the commission as acting MD.
On October 29, 2019, the Senate President read out the
President’s NDDC board nominees for screening and confirmation, raising hope
that the interim interregnum was about over especially when he directed the
committee on NDDC to screen and report back to the house in one week. That
announcement had hardly settled in when the Niger Delta Affairs Minister
Godswill Akpabio announced a three-man interim management committee for the commission,
with the rather unusual, if not cheeky, comment that the interim management
committee will oversee a forensic audit ordered by the president. Asked what
happens to the new board when confirmed by the Senate, the minister said that
they will wait to be sworn in after the interim management committee’s work is
done. The Senate felt slighted, and rightly so.
Senate President Ahmad Lawan did not mince words at plenary on
November 5, 2019, when he dismissed the interim management committee as illegal
and asked the new board, 15 of which members were confirmed, to take over the
commission in line with the law setting up the NDDC.
Nigerians have been held in suspended animation at an incongruous reality where a legally competent board has to wait on the sideline
as the minister plays corporate games and the presidency seems to be
nonchalant.
To permit the argument that NDDC needs an interim management
committee to supervise the audit probe can as well apply to every facet of the
country, and we may well say all institutions and arms of government be
dissolved for interim committees to run them because of their perceived
failures. That sounds implausible but that is what the NDDC reality now
extrapolates on a national scale. If that is implausible, therefore, what feeds
the current situation where a competent board is waiting in the wings for an
illegal ‘interim management committee’ to run the NDDC? Only two things can
explain this: corruption and administrative confusion.
Groups in the Niger Delta, legal authorities and other
stakeholders in the NDDC have questioned the rationale in not inaugurating the
new NDDC board, attributing it to design to compromise the forensic audit by
the minister who has been a major player in the commission over the last 18
years since it was set up. As Akwa Ibom State Governor, he nominated a
chairman, a managing director and several state representatives to the NDDC Board between 2007 and 2015, and influenced others too. Given that the
commission has been a cash cow for most of the governors through their
nominees, what transparency can Akpabio sell?
In the end, the buck stops on President Buhari’s desk. He can
decide to bury his head in the sand, while Akpabio plays Russian roulette with
his name, as he has done in the last few weeks, peddling the Buhari name to
justify his assault on the law and due process. But the people of the Niger
Delta are watching with baited breadth the NDDC drama where the law is being
trampled on with reckless disregard by the minister.
For his legacy, which should be on due process and the rule of
law, President Buhari should as a matter of urgency take back the NDDC from
Akpabio and inaugurate the new NDDC board. It is needless to state here that
you cannot build something on nothing, the same way you cannot build a proper
organisation on illegal management. It is a lesson the battle on corruption
and abuse of due process has exposed over the last few years. And of all
persons, for someone committed to due process and transparency, President
Buhari cannot ignore the facts. He cannot, and should not, allow the confusion
in the NDDC and disregard for due process be the defining attributes of his
administration, let alone define his regard for the Niger Delta people.
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