Bashir Ahmad, President Buhari’s media aide, has claimed that the reasons why the people of the Niger-Delta region are not well-off despite the large number of resources the region receives from the federal government......READ THE FULL ARTICLE>>>
NDDC, according to Ahmad, has not made judicious use of the funding it has received from the federal government over twenty years, even though the commission was established by the federal government.
According to Naija News, the presidential media aide stated on his verified Facebook page on Thursday that the NDDC has not put the massive funds it has received from the government to good use in the service of the people.
On Thursday, at the University of Uyo in Akwa Ibom State, during the virtual commissioning of an NDDC hostel project, Ahmad deviated from the statement of his principal and said something else.
“The lives of the people of the Niger Delta could be so much better if the funding received by the NDDC since its inception, amounting to billions of naira over the last 20 years, had been widely deployed in the service of the people,” he wrote.
While this is going on, it should be noted that the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Senator Godswill Akpabio, recently submitted to President Muhammadu Buhari a forensic audit report on the NDCC.
There has been speculation that the report, which covers the activities of the commission between 2000 and 2019, revealed a loot of approximately N6 trillion.
The documents, which were delivered in sacks on behalf of the president, were received by the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, in September of the following year.
During a press conference following the handover, Akpabio revealed that the forensic audit covered a total of 13,777 contracts awarded between 2001 and 2019, with a total final contract value of N3, 274,206,032,213.24 million.
In response, Buhari, speaking through Malami, promised that no one involved in the misappropriation of the six trillion nairas pumped into the NDDC would be spared. He stated that no one indicted for shady dealings in the NDDC would be spared, no matter how high up in the organization they were.