APC chieftain accuses ‘sit-tight’ NDDC Board of administrative fraud

A national officer of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr. Yekini Nabena, has petitioned President Muhammadu Buhari to readress what he termed as “the injustice and illegality” regarding the subsistence of the current Board of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC).

In an open letter to the president dated February 26, 2018, Nabena, who is a National Ex-Officio Member of APC from Bayelsa State, said the tenure of the Board formally ended last December and its continued stay was like allowing illegitimacy to run riot.

Nabena said the tenures of the NDDC Managing Director/Chief Executive, Nsima Udo Ekere, and chairman of the commission’s Board, Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba, expired since last year, judging by the terms of their appointment and the law establishing NDDC, which explicitly stated that they were to complete their respective state’s tenure.

While Ndoma-Egba was appointed to serve out the tenure of fellow Cross River State indigene, Senator Bassey Ewa-Henshaw, Ekere was chosen to complete the tenure of fellow Akwa Ibom citizen, Mr. Bassey Dan-Abia, Nabena stated.

Ewa-Henshaw and Dan-Abia were inaugurated in 2013 for a four-year term that ought to have ended last December.

The APC leader said Ndoma-Egba and Ekere’s continued stay in office was fraudulent and a demonstration of contempt for the law. He alleged that Bayelsa State, to which the board chairmanship post ought to have reverted, and other NDDC states were being short-changed under the current situation.

He also lambasted the managing director and the chairman for allegedly applying manipulative schemes to try to change the rules to give themselves more time in office. “The resort to sit-tight, crude propaganda and manipulation does not only display an arrogant contempt for the law guiding the Commission, but it also offends basic decency and public morality,” he stated, stressing, “In fact, it amounts to administrative fraud. Any further day the board exists is tantamount to allowing wilful iniquity and illegality to run riot. Moreover, the fact that they have been paying themselves all manner of allowances even after the expiration of their legal tenure is criminal.”

Nabena urged Buhari to quickly redress the anomalous situation by disbanding the NDDC Board and reconstituting it based on fairness in order to restore sanity to the commission’s leadership and save the image of his government and its campaign to bring about change.

Mathew Dadiya, Abuja