NDDC: APC Candidate, Others Share Over N1tr Contracts

By Fola James

The NDDC has become a big scam since President Muhammadu Buhari order a probe of the government’s interventionist agency for Nigeria’s oil producing state.

A forensic iñvestigation set up by the interim management has continued to open a can of worms, the latest rev koelation being that the sacked Managing Direct of the NDDC, Nsima Ekere and his successor awarded N1trillion fraudulent contracts.

Ekere was the candidate of the APC in last year governorship election in Akwa Ibom State.

The amount represents the total budget for NDDC  for three years, considering that the federal government only budgeted N400bn for the agency in 2019.

But the agency awarded over N1.3 trillion contracts in three years, accordingly to new revelations.

The Interim Management Committee of the agency on Wednesday, broke the ice on how the sacked management awarded spurious contracts in the past three years to the tune of over N1tn without due process.

According to Cairo Ojoughoh,

Acting Executive Director, Projects, and Chairman, Contracts Verification Committee, all the contracts awarded within the period failed due process.

Dr Ojougboh, who briefed newsmen in Port Harcourt, explained that such contracts were wrongly tagged emergency contracts, targeted at enriching some unnamed persons.

He said the contracts awarded by the commission between 2016 and 2019 are spurious, criminal, insisting that most of the awards were not backed by budget and had no bills of engineering measurement or drawings.

He said the fraudulent contract awards were only open cheques for the contractors and their collaborators to fill in at the nearest banks, maintaining that ahead of the forensic audit, the verification to be carried out by his committee would expose the spurious contracts.

He stated that President Buhari saved the agency from imminent collapse by ordering a probe.

“Among other things, this verification is intended to establish the true position of the emergency regime between 2016 and 2019 in the commission,” Ojugbo said.

He said “It is now common knowledge that some of the awards were not only spurious, but criminal as records available to us showed that most of the awards were not backed by budget, had no bills of engineering measurement or drawings and were just open cheques for contractors and their collaborators to fill in at the nearest banks.

In 2017, for instance, the commission awarded a total of 201 emergency contacts valued at N100.4bn.”

Ojugbo said he’s shocked that “In 2018, a total 1,057 emergency contracts valued at N162.69bn; and just seven months of 2019, a total of 1,921 emergency contracts valued at N1.07tn were awarded.

So, we are talking of a total of over N1.3tn in less than three years.”