Obong Umana Okon Umana is the new Minister of Niger Delta Affairs. Barely two weeks on duty, he already has his job situationally and contextually defined. He superintends, among others, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), a commission that has garnered more odium for graft and larceny than it has garnered for development and efficiency.

NDDC, therefore, requires the services of an enforcer. Many believe that Umana is that enforcer. The former CEO of Oil & Gas Free Zones Authority Nigeria flaunts expertise in strategic management, finance, public administration, political economics, budgeting and control, among a swelter of soft skills acquired over decades of active private and public engagements.

A graduate of School of Business from Columbia University (USA), he boasts in his academic cabinet an MBA, Finance certificate from the University of Port Harcourt and a BSc (Hons) in Economics from the University of Calabar, among a bouquet of other certifications. He comes to the job prepared. Serving as Secretary to the State Government (SSG) under the transformational leadership years of Senator Godswill Akpabio in Akwa Ibom, Umana packs enough potency in his administrative kit.

With barely nine months to the end of the tenure of the incumbent government, Umana would be requiring more than book wisdom to navigate through the undulating contours which the management of the NDDC has become. His job is perfectly defined by the courageous performance of his immediate predecessor, Akpabio, who, against all odds and articulated high octane scheming by naysayers, pushed through a forensic audit that confirmed the fears of Nigerians. The detailed forensic audit which covered 18 years of operations of the NDDC, unearthed a morally disgusting underbelly of a commission strewn with financial profligacy, inverted workplace ethic and brazen corruption that jabbed at the very soul of a people long neglected and undone by the ignoble avarice of their own sons and daughters.

The details of the audit are too grisly to recount verbatim. They are horrifying as they are benumbing. The saddest aspect of it all is that all the mindless stealing and savage roguery that were captured in the forensic audit report were committed by Niger Delta sons and daughters; elites from the oil-rich region who diverted money meant for the development of the area and uplift of their people into their personal pockets. To borrow the words of Mrs. Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch, the 42-year-old Nigerian-born British MP (Conservative) who has stepped out in the race to succeed disgraced British PM Boris Johnson, they “use public money as their private piggybanks.” That’s exactly what the forensic audit exposed: How Niger Delta sons and daughters within and among themselves colluded, most eerily, to convert Niger Delta people’s money to their personal piggybanks. Akpabio, himself, captured what befell the NDDC in the past years, thus: “I think people were treating the place as an ATM, where you just walk in there to pluck money and go away.”

The report of the forensic which was ordered by President Muhammadu Buhari in August, 2019 was submitted on September 2, 2021. It revealed so much, some details too cruel to be real. Get it: NDDC operated 362 bank accounts between 2001 and 2019; forensic audit covered a total of 13,777 contracts (most of them compromised) that were awarded from 2001 to 2019 at a final contract value of over N3trillion; Federal Government approved close to N6trillion for the NDDC in 18 years (2001 to 2019); etc.

President Buhari breaks it down: “It is on record that between 2001 and 2019, the Federal Government has approved N3, 375, 735,776,794.93 (Three Trillion, Three Hundred  and Seventy Five Billion, Seven Hundred and Seventy Six Thousand, Seven Hundred and Ninety Four Naira, Ninety Three Kobo as budgetary allocation and N2,420,948,894,191.00 (Two Trillion, Four Hundred and Twenty Billion, Nine Hundred and Forty Million, and, Eight Hundred and Ninety Four Thousand, One Hundred and Ninety One Naira) as income from statutory and non-statutory sources, which brings the total figure to the sum of approximately Six Trillion Naira given to the Niger Delta Development Commission.”

Big money, but the bottom line is that the huge sums do not match the under-development of the region.

Since the report was submitted and even during the period the audit was ongoing, some of the rogue contractors quietly returned to site. The most compelling need is to ensure the implementation of the recommendations of the report. This is the brief before Umana: How to ensure that Niger Delta money is used for the development of Niger Delta. He must ensure that those who stole the people’s money must be made to account. Crime festers where criminals are not punished.

Surely, there will be pressure on Umana to constitute a Board for the NDDC. There is a list of cleared nominees for NDDC Board waiting for inauguration. In theory, there is a tendency to nudge Umana to implement the inauguration of this Board. But do you inaugurate a Board nine months to the expiration of the tenure of a government? Legally, the life of the Board is tenured, fixed. But experience has shown that Nigerian governments do not always play by the rules. Any NDDC Board inaugurated today may not exist beyond first week of June, 2023, depending on which political party takes over at Aso Rock. The fractured and toxic Nigeria political system does not allow for inclusivity. The winner-takes-all syndrome always influences decisions, including decision to preserve a Board the incoming President or Governor did not appoint.

Under Akpabio, NDCC had functioned with an interim management (which many argue is unknown to the Act setting up the Commission). But a flip side of the debate is that all the corruption, looting and contract fraud committed in NDDC’s first 18 years of existence were committed under the supervision, and as the audit report has revealed, collusion with members of previous Boards. So, even the existence of substantive Boards has not helped the efficiency of the NDDC. On the contrary, it created a special dysfunctional administrative ecosystem that turned a development-centric interventionist commission into a despoiler and conduit for robbing a whole region. Boards must be Boards for development, not Boards for wanton stealing.

Umana must resist the politics of Board inauguration and concentrate on the low-hanging deliverables of making sure that outstanding development projects are completed. He would serve Niger Deltans better by implementing recommendations of the audit report rather than dabble into the already highly politicised exercise of inaugurating a new Board.

Umana arrives at the Niger Delta Ministry with a reputation of integrity, diligence, and a “track record of performance in his previous offices” (according to Akpabio). He will do well to bring these to bear on his Ministry, particularly on the NDDC, a commission which holds in its bowels the good, the not-so-good and the ugliest things that have happened to the Niger Delta people. His reputation of efficient resource management and administrative mastery presages him to his new office. Many believe in him to work for the people, not for the rogue clan of dubious contractors. Akpabio raised the bar with the audit, Umana must up the ante with implementation – for the good of the people.

..First published in Sunday Sun