Tina Amanda
A Civil Society Group in Rivers state has threatened to take legal actions against the Presidency and the Niger Delta Development Commission NDDC, for failure to release the forensic audit to the public and constitute a substantive Board.
Addressing the newsmen in Port Harcourt, Programme Coordinator, Social Action, Botti Isaac, issued a fourteen days ultimatum or a massive protest will be carried out to shutdown NDDC operations.
According to him, the right thing needs to be done as NDDC has continuously violated the act that established the Commission.
He maintained that confrontation is the only solution to the lingering issues in NDDC as several steps towards dialogue made in the past have not yielded any positive result.
“We are exploring legal actions to ensure these demands are met. If by end of September 2021, the substantive Board is not constituted, we will be left with no option but to take up legal suit against the government particularly, the Ministry of NDDC and the Presidency. We have been working with some other Civil Society Organizations such as SERAP, EDA, looking at ways to set things right.
“We have discovered that dialogue does not solve any issue, we have to be confrontational, but then we also need to know there are dynamics.
“Within the next two weeks, if the forensic report is not released to the public; if the NDDC budget passed in December 2020 is not made available; if the board is not established, we will organize a massive protest that will paralyse activities in the NDDC headquarters for weeks.
“We are monitoring development and the turn of event, if it turns out that none of these is achieved within the fourteen days ultimatum, we the Civil Right in alliance with other groups will ensure we drive home our point.
“Social Action group is not one of those organisations that compromise, we do not take Kobo from the government of the state, federal or any organization in Nigeria to do our work. We get our funding from outside the country and we are satisfied with the level of support we get”.
He said NDDC should be manned by credible people, not politicians coming to embezzle funds for purpose of running elections.
“Development experts should be brought on board to manage the commission as development agencies are run elsewhere in the world for development to reach oil-bearing communities that are still impoverished. The NDDC is supposed to be a development agency and not an offshoot, an arm of any party in power, as it is currently.”
