The sweeping restructuring going on at the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) has cancelled about 600 contracts and projects in the federal agency.
Managing Director of the Commission, Nsima Ekere revealed in Port Harcourt on Thursday that NDDC’s management and board took the decision to adopt a ‘4R’ initiative as the roadmap to development.
The 4R initiative is Restructuring the balance sheet, Reforming governance protocols, Restoring core mandate and Reaffirming commitment to doing what is right and proper.
While stressing that the NDDC balance sheet was over bloated with contingent liabilities in excess of N1.3tn, Ekere was quick to note that there is nothing to justify the liabilities.
He said “The move became imperative looking at the resources coming on monthly or yearly basis which necessitated restructuring it in a manner that will be meaningful to achieve results”.
“The last management meeting approved cancellation of over 600 projects that NDDC already embarked on.
“We discovered that some of the contracts were either not properly awarded or some of them were awarded but the contractors have not yet gone to site.
“Some of the contracts were awarded as late as 2002 with some of the contractors collecting advance payments from the commission with zero work done at the sites.
“So, we terminated these contracts worth about N200bn, which is the first phase of our restructuring the commission’s balance sheet,” he said.
According to him, the second phase of restructuring of the commission’s balance sheet would affect projects that have only attained zero to five per cent completion status.
Ekere explained that the Niger Delta Regional Development Master Plan was a plan that articulated policies and programmes that ought to be collectively executed by different development partners.
He listed the development partners to include federal, state and local governments; Ministry of Niger Delta, International Oil Companies, the World Bank, European Union and USAID among others.
