No to zonal development commissions

Recently, there have been renewed agitations in the House of Representatives to pass into law a bill seeking to create Development Commissions for all the geopolitical zones in the country.

This is following the creation of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) in 2000 and the North East Development Commission (NEDC) in 2017.

Following the Senate’s passage of the bill for the creation of the South-East Development Commission (SEDC) in 2018, the remaining geopolitical zones in the country, namely, the South-West, North-Central and North-West all tabled before the legislature, bills seeking the establishment of commissions to cater to their various development challenges.

During a session about a fortnight ago, the House of Representatives, Speaker, Femi Gbajagbiamila said, “We’ve agreed to establish zonal commissions in all the zones, like the North-East Development Commission. We’ll have the South-West, South-East, North-West, South-South and that goes a long way in resolving regional and zonal issues.”

From this, it becomes clear that the proliferation of development commissions is firmly on the agenda. Whether these bills, if passed, would be assented to by the president remains to be seen.

However, this resolve by the House of Representatives presents several problems. The proliferation of zonal development commissions will not solve the development challenges facing the various parts of the country. Instead, all it would do is put pressure on the already lean resources of the country.

Since the establishment of the NDDC 21 years ago with billions of naira pumped into it over the years, the Niger Delta Region remains largely underdeveloped. The NDDC’s performance records in terms of fulfilling its core mandate has remained abysmal. One of these core mandates, apart from infrastructure development of the region, is to train and educate youths to curb militancy. Yet two decades after its establishment, youths in the region are still on government stipends to prevent them from taking up arms against the state. Records show that there are today nearly 2000 contracts awarded by the commission that have been abandoned.

What the NDDC has achieved without question is scandal after scandal, as demonstrated by the Senate’s probe of the Commission’s interim management committee last year that revealed that billions had been siphoned by corrupt public officials for their personal use.

The government’s N10 billion take-off grant to the NEDC in 2018 is enticement enough for the other geopolitical regions to push for their Development Commissions as it guarantees an endless stream of billions in public funds that could easily be channelled into private pockets.  The NEDC was created with the mandate to “Receive and manage funds from allocation from the federation account and international donors for the settlement, rehabilitation and reconstruction of roads, houses and business premises of victims of insurgency’’.

Questions remain about how much of that mandate the NEDC has been able to achieve since its establishment that would warrant the creation of other zonal development commissions.

Considering the government’s plan to cut down bureaucracy and duplication, overlap of duties and functions, it is wise that the administration considers these zonal development commissions as a duplication of functions that state governments that receive federal allocations are supposed to discharge but have largely failed to do so.

The agitation for these commissions is simply a lazy approach to governance and a deliberate reluctance to shirk the responsibility of good governance that would see the government identify and address the challenges these commissions are supposed to solve. Creating these commissions simply means a failure of the states and a sly return to regional governance. We do not have to create a commission to address every national itch. Existing agencies and other institutions should be made to do their work instead. Throwing commissions at every issue allows for deflection of duties by those who ought to carry them out.

It must be stated here that the NASS’s preoccupation with establishing mushroom zonal commissions is both an embarrassment to lawmaking and a waste of public resources that would best be channelled into reviewing the relevance of the already established commissions and gradually phasing them out after achieving their mandates. If anything, the lawmakers should be looking at ways to manage the available resources. For a country that borrows to supplement its budget, this is definitely not the way to go.

We are categorical in our stance against these needless duplications, the entrenchment of a culture of shirking responsibility by duplicating offices and the establishment of drain pipes that will mostly serve the pockets of a few corrupt officials.

There are better ways to provide good governance, infrastructural and human capital development. Duplicating zonal commissions is not one of them.