Senator Tayo Alasoadura, the minister of State for Niger Delta Affairs says the dissolution of the recently screened board of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, was in order, as the move prevented the perpetuation of corruption in the interventionist agency.
The Minister during Governor Godwin Obaseki, in Benin, said that the new leadership in the ministry would not sit and watch corruption thrive, saying that was why it worked meticulously to put the right people in the right places.
He said: “The first thing is the forensic audit. We have to know what was wrong in the past and what we can do to ameliorate it.
“We know a lot of corrupt practices were perpetuated in NDDC in the past, as almost N3 trillion was expended with nothing to show for it. We have about 12,000 abandoned NDDC projects and these are projects that are not really worth doing at all.
“I was discouraged and sad when I saw the housing scheme being developed by our Ministry in this state. The place is so bushy; almost everything has been vandalized. I believe if that place had been completed, people will not want to stay there because there is no infrastructure, schools or a security post.” The Minister expressed dissatisfaction with the quality and state of the housing estate projects executed by the ministry in the state, adding that he was in Edo to evaluate such projects.
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On his part, Obaseki said, “We support the reorganization that is taking place in the NDDC. I don’t believe that there is any other state that has been deprived like Edo in terms of resources that were allocated to it through the NDDC.”
He noted that the ministry was happy with the dissolution of the NDDC board by the president, as it was set up at a wrong time, stressing, “When we were saying we want to find out what had happened in the past, people just rushed to form a new board and as far as we are concerned, we saw that as ensuring it was business as usual for the new people.”
Meanwhile, the governor said the previous management had apologized that they did not achieve 20 per cent allocation performance in the state.
The governor said the state government would work better with the new management of the Ministry of Niger Delta as it believes that it would ensure that the NDDC was no longer used as political slush fund but rather for the development of the region.
