To Make Meaningful Impact, NDDC Must Go Back to Its Core Mandate

Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), Nsima Ekere, in this interview, says for the commission to make any meaningful impact in the development of the Niger Delta region, it must go back to its core

Youhavebeeninofficeforaboutsixmonths plus.Whatchallengesdidyoumeetand whatachievementshaveyourecordedsofar? The NDDC you all know and some of you have been in this commission much longer than I have been. I am not coming to tell you anything that you already don’t know. When we came in and we looked at what we found on ground. I mean without disparaging the efforts and contributions of past managements and board, we will first of all acknowledge their contributions in laying a solid foundation for the take-off of the NDDC. We also saw that a whole lot needs to be done. One of the things that stunned me and members of my team when we came in was the report of the Orosanya Panel that was set up to restructure the NDDC.

The second thing that struck us was the report of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms that had looked into the NDDC and with the view to re-structuring it and getting it set to do business and deliver efficiently. Now, the conclusion of that report as presented to us by Dr. Joe Abbah, was that when they studied NDDC, they found out that virtually everything that can possibly be wrong with an organization was wrong with the NDDC. So, based on that, we came up with a very ambitious and well-articulated reform programme that we tagged the 4-R strategy aimed at reforming the NDDC, restoring it back to its core mandate and getting it to deliver efficiently for the good of the Niger Delta people, the government and all the stakeholders in the region. And we said that we must first of all, reform the governance system, to put in place the right system to run the NDDC.

So, the process and system of running the NDDC must be properly reformed so that it can run efficiently and deliver efficiently.

We said we must restructure our balance sheet. The NDDC balance sheet is presently over-bloated. We have contingent liability in excess of N1.3 trillion. Therefore, there is the need to look at the resources of the commission, whatever the receivables that come on monthly and yearly basis is and then reform that balance sheet so that it can become more meaningful and achievable. One of the steps we have taken already and we have already done this, at the last management meeting, we approved the cancellation of over 600 projects that the NDDC already procured. We discovered that those projects, some of those contracts were either not properly procured, some of them were procured while the contractors had not gone to site and some of them were as late as 2001.

Surprisingly and sadly also, some of the contractors already have collected advance payments from the commission and yet zero work have been done on site. So, we terminated those contracts worth about N200 billion. That is the first phase of reforming of the balance sheet that we are doing.

The second phase is going to involve projects that are between zero and five per cent completion, because some of the contractors also have gone to site quite alright but they have achieved very negligible work compared to what they were originally contracted to do. If you look at the scope of work in their Bill of Engineering Measurement (BEM) estimate and see what they have achieved is very negligible. So, we are going to look at some of them. Some contractors have not been to site for upward of five, six, seven years and they have achieved so little. The next phase will be to look at those contracts and we will determine them as well. And then, we must restore the commission to its core mandate.