The group described the Buhari administration’s failure to constitute the NDDC board as depriving the region of substantive representation, economic growth and development.
An advocacy group in the South-South region known as the Movement for Sustainable Development of the Niger Delta, (MSDND) has sent a protest letter to President Muhammadu Buhari over his government’s inability to constitute a board of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC since he assumed office.
The group in the letter to Buhari and signed by its National Coordinator, Chief Ayibatekena Olodin, described the Buhari administration’s failure to constitute the NDDC board as depriving the region of substantive representation, economic growth and development.
The group said, “We have observed that in the seven years of your administration, a substantive board of the NDDC has never been constituted. Instead of constituting a board, all we have had under your administration is a dramatic monologue of confusion and administration brouhaha.
“Many Niger Delta stakeholders have written and others have protested against the continued use of the affairs of the NDDC as a comic relief for an already tensed polity. The lack of a substantive NDDC board has robbed the region of over seven years of substantive representation, economic growth and development.
“The Niger Delta people are firmly against the appointment of a new NDDC Interim administrator. Instead of acceding to the provocative plan of anti-All Progressives Congress politicians for the sack of Effiong Akwa, it is better for the President to salvage the failed rating of his administration and that of his party by appointing a substantive board to complete the announced sanitisation of the commission.
“We are writing Your Excellency, to appoint a substantive NDDC board and to direct the Interim administrator to pay suffering Niger Delta Contractors who have lost so much as many of their businesses and properties have been confiscated by banks for failure to repay the loans they took to fund their NDDC jobs. Many others have died in penury and left their siblings devastated.”