By Akinwale Kasali
The House of Representatives have summoned Nsima Ekere, Nelson Brambaifa, Emmanuel Agwariavwodo and other former bosses and members of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, to appear before them on Friday 27th September, 2019, over an alleged N61.4 billion abandoned projects.
The Green Chamber had already grilled some members of the NDDC Board on Wednesday before summoning Ekere and others.
Those grilled on Wednesday were the Acting Managing Director, Akwagaga Denying; Director of Finance and Supply, Linus Ogbalubi; and Director of Project Monitoring and Supervision, Ukeme Nkamare.
The Green Chamber asked them to provide documents over overpayment of contractors and contracts awarded without execution.
The ad hoc committee set up by the House to investigate projects abandoned by the NDDC raised a series of questions, bordering on how several contracts were allegedly awarded and paid for by the commission outside the approved budget of the commission.
Chairman of the Committee, Nicholas Ossai, read out parts of a report by the Office of the Auditor-General on NDDC’s activities between 2013 and 2018.
He quoted the report as saying that, “Considering the enormous amount of money paid to the contractors as mobilisation fees without any value derived thereby, it can be affirmed that the commission lacked effective control in the process of contract award and payment.”
Ossai stressed that the key issue raised by the auditors, which the NDDC had yet to respond to, was that the commission should recover the sum of N61.4bn that the contractors had collected.
He cited a case of how contracts for the emergency repairs of 250 roads were awarded earlier in the year without the approval of the Bureau of Public Procurement and out of NDDC’s approved budget.
The committee also asked how a contractor was paid over 50 per cent of a contract sum of over N1bn, with only 11 per cent of the job done, and the contract was cancelled and re-awarded for over N10bn.
Ossai asked if the NDDC could remember awarding a contract to a company for the Ogborodo shore protection.
“The figure here is that the contract, with a sum of N1.042bn, was awarded to this engineering company and examination of the NDDC contract payment status from the Finance and Account Department revealed that the contractor had been paid 50 per cent – N521.3m – for job that was done less than 11 per cent,” he stated.
Following the inability of the NDDC members to answer some salient and sensitive questions posed to them by the Committee, this brought about the decision to invite other to face the House on Friday.
The Committee added that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, will also be invited to investigate the case and unravel the truth.
