By Gbenga Abulude(Politics and General desk)
A former president of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) and an eminent Human Rights lawyer, Mr Ledum Mitee, has joined the call for the sack of officials of the Interim Management Committee (IMC) of Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) over allegations of corruption.
Mr Mitee, an erstwhile chairman of the Board of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) who spoke at the weekend in an interview with a Lagos based newspaper advocated stiff punishment against officials of the NDDC’s IMC including ensuring that they are made to face the music under various relevant anti-graft laws in the country.
Mr Mitee stressed that it is most unethical and unacceptable for persons charged with the task of overseeing the NDDC to be misappropriating funds meant for the development of the Niger Delta region.
It would be recalled that the National Assembly Committees on NDDC including those of both the Senate and the House of Representatives had at various sittings probed alleged illicit spending by the IMC of the NDDC. The IMC was accused of embarking on illicit, and unlawful expenditure that amounted to acts of financial infractions and alleged corruption to the tune of about N81.5bn between January and July 2020.
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Recall also that these lingering allegations of corrupt practices leveled against the Commission’s IMC had escalated calls for an outright sack and prosecution of members of the IMC, including its acting managing director, Professor Kemebradikumo Pondei.
The Senate Committee had subsequently come up with far-reaching recommendations including outright disengagement of the IMC to help address the crisis of legitimacy. The Committee also canvassed the inauguration of the already screened and confirmed NDDC Board to help resolve the myriad crisis and challenges plaguing the region including supervision of the forensic audit ordered by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Mitee, a frontline Niger Delta activist in his interview at the weekend came very hard on the NDDC’s IMC. He said: “If they say you spent over N81bn within a period of less than one year and you say members of the National Assembly also got contracts, that is not an answer. It is like being accused of stealing and you say that some of those accusing you stole last year.
“That is not an answer to the question; I am not excusing that. But if members of the National Assembly got contracts and you are responsible for awarding those contracts, did you follow due process in the award of those contracts and did they perform? If they did not perform, what did you people do, as the people who gave out the contracts? Every contract has a penalty clause. Even the ones that local people, not lawyers, in Mushin, Lagos, draft, would also say something will happen if they are not executed. Why have you not activated the penalty(clause) against those who got those contracts and did you report to the agencies?
Read also: Uneasy Calm In N’Delta Over NDDC’s N81.5bn Scandal
“These are pertinent questions. The news I saw on television was that students, purportedly scholarship holders, were demonstrating in London that their fees had not been paid. Meanwhile, we heard of hundreds of millions of naira that was spent during the lockdown to attend the graduation of students, and nothing is happening.”
He added: ” They(IMC) said they spent billions of naira on forensic audit or some trash like that. Why are they spending that money? Doesn’t NDDC have external auditors? Beyond that, NEITI that has the statutory responsibility to publish audits on some of these entities, including the NDDC has been churning out reports…What does forensic audit mean? You are just saying the place(NDDC) should be audited; to call it forensic is just to give it(audit) some name. If you give half of that money spent on forensic audit to NEITI, it will be enough for them to not only audit the NDDC but also the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation(NNPC), Petroleum Trust Fund and almost all the entities that receive extractive revenue. So why are we now going to give another job to the “boys”? That is why I say nothing is likely to come out of it.”
On allegations that some former governors allegedly got contracts from the NDDC, the former NEITI chairman pontificated that there is nothing wrong or inappropriate in former governors being awarded contracts as long as those contracts followed due process and were executed. He explained: ” Getting a contract is not a crime by itself, if it was competed for and won legitimately. If a former governor governor got a contract to tar all the roads in the Niger Delta and we all have tarred roads, we will clap for him.”
While calling for concerted actions, Mitee expressed concern that no noticeable action has been taken against officials of the IMC since the scandal of illicit expenditure broke at the NDDC. ” So, when people start saying that we took over 1bn to take care of ourselves and we are not shocked, the agency responsible for anti-corruption is not shocked into taking some actions, then you will sit down and say this is how down the cliff we have gone. I am not one of those amused,” he noted.
Recall that the ICPC had recently arrested some directors of the NDDC over allegations of massive corruption. Among those arrested include the director of education, social and health services. The ICPC which confirmed the arrest however said the arrested officials were granted administrative bail.
