Waiting for Tinubu on Niger Delta conundrum

Due to the fast paced take-off of his administration, and early yield of positive dividends from such enterprise, President Bola Ahmed TInubu has raised the bar with respect to how a government that wants to serve Nigerians should run. The attendant expectations from the administration have been widespread with several needy areas of the polity and economy looking forward to be next on the queue for attention; given that the lackluster eight years of former President Muhamadu Buhari proved to be for them, a better forgotten span of time. What with the reign of impunity and kleptocracy which trademarked the administration of Buhari, and the attendant loss of confidence in government by a wide cross-section of the Nigerian public—with most citizens hardly reconciling themselves with government’s intentions and predilections at most times, the stage seems to be forming for remediation of all that has been lost by the country under Buhari. This is especially so for those areas of the nation’s life which easily constitute make-or-break factors for any administration. This is also where and why the Niger Delta qualifies for early attention by Tinubu, as it is always a make or break factor for even the newly forming Tinubu administration. And perhaps for good measure, among Tinubu’s first set of appointees as Special Advisers—Nuhu Ribadu as National Security Adviser and Olu Verheijen for Energy—are two officers whose briefs include direct business with the Niger Delta.

For all practical intents and purposes the Niger Delta region which President Bola Tinubu inherited from his predecessor Muhamadu Buhari on May 29th 2023, is a region that has demonstrated significant self -restraint in the face of provocative, dashing of hopes of remediation of its privations by the immediate past administration. Granted that the Buhari administration was associated with initiating some measures aimed at ameliorating the malcontent in the region over age-long maltreatment by successive Nigerian administrations, the poor execution of such initiatives proved to be their undoing and by implication same for the administration.

By May 29th 2015 when Buhari took office for his first tenure, his administration inherited three landmark interventionist programmes for the Niger Delta region namely the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs (MNDA), and the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP). The NDDC was launched by President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2000 as a response to the age-long challenge of rapid, multi-dimensional development of the region through the creation of a statutory platform. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs was created in 2008, by the Yar Adua administration which followed it up with the establishment of PAP, as a fire-brigade measure in 2019 to stop the then raging agitation of youth of the region, who had mounted a devastating armed assault on the country’s oil and gas exports, and thereby its economic jugular. PAP came primary to administer directly to the warring agitators, palliatives comprising cash handouts as well as the incentives of training schemes and empowerment programmes, in exchange for termination of armed militancy and surrender of arms by the agitators.

At the time of Buhari’s exit from office the two agencies being NDDC and PAP had recorded different trajectories in mixed fortunes, with equally varied states of affairs for the incoming Tinubu administration to meet. While the NDDC was embroiled in a macabre round of infighting between Lauretta Onochie the Chairman of the Board of Directors and Samuel Ogbuku the Managing Director, the PAP had a better tale as its current Interim Administrator, Major General Barry Ndiomu (retd), had made his mark even as like his predecessors he operated under an ambience where leadership success is tied to the delivery of cash handout to an unchanging list of about 30,000 ex-agitators; a practice that has been running since 2009. Ever since then, the success of any Administrator of the scheme has been defined by the retention of the status quo.

With the coming of Tinubu and his inclination to direct the economy away from preponderance of the public sector and redirection of public largesse toward tangible dividends oriented tendencies, the PAP may need to undergo some restructuring to reconcile it with the emerging direction of the administration which is the promotion of seamless interface between the public and private sectors.

Incidentally, in trying to reverse the traditional context of pacifying the ex-agitators with mere handouts, there had been a long sought-after vision that the PAP should promote the migration of the ex-agitators from dependence on government handouts to viable, business oriented economic self-sustenance. So far the Presidential Amnesty Programme Co-operative Scheme (PAPCOSOL) launched by Ndiomu is offering itself as a mark-up on traditional approaches, which may interest Nuhu Ribadu, as the new National Security Adviser in whose brief the PAP now falls.

It is not surprising that with the new administration there are already calls for a change of leadership for the agency. Yet there remains the fact that a new leadership for a body may not always translate into better approach to organisational challenges. Rather, Ribadu’s and by implication Tinubu’s success with the Niger Delta youth lies in rapid promotion of their economic inclusion and self-sufficiency, with progressively diminishing dependence on handout culture – old or new leadership for the PAP notwithstanding. This is where Ndiomu’s PAPCOSOL needs a more that casual glance from Ribadu, with or without Ndiomu still in office.

As for the NDDC, its narrative had been one of serial breach of its founding act by successive leaderships, leading to when in 2019, governors of the Niger Delta states met Buhari to review the operations of the agency and make it more responsive to the needs of their states. That meeting spawned the birth of the directive by President Buhari for the forensic audit of the agency from inception in 2000 to 2019. The forensic audit exposed how over 13,000 projects were abandoned by contractors and consultants along with conniving staff of the agency, even after trillions of naira had been collected either as mobilisation fees or full payment for the not executed jobs. The acute demerit of this situation was that the missing 13,000 projects constituted the very infrastructural facilities that would have changed the narrative of the region as they comprised roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, markets, houses, and sundry economic empowerment schemes. It is recalled that Buhari had threatened to visit all culprits in the NDDC grand scam with fire and brimstone before his exit, and failed to do so, not surprisingly.

As at last count the NDDC is still seething in the cauldron of organisational incontinence which has been exacerbated by the dissolution of the Board of Directors, but with the retention of Ogbuku, ostensibly  to hold brief in order not to allow the agency return to the ignoble ‘locust days’ of Interim Administrator. While the new dispensation may have ushered in a seeming sense of relief for the Ogbuku camp with the exit of Onochie, that may only be a phyrric victory for his backers if the proverb that ‘the cane used to beat the first wife may also be used on the second one’, is anything to go by.

Ogbuku has in his short stay as the NDDC boss reportedly demonstrated a knack for megalomania with his scathing battle to oust Onochie over a most unrealistic and questionable railway scheme, and extended his reach to launch a hare-brained NDDC sponsored ‘Niger Delta Chamber of Commerce’ agenda, to displace the existing city chambers of commerce and industry in the region, only to be stopped by the National Association of Chambers of Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA).

Hence, against the backdrop of the foregoing and other issues not mentioned here, whenever President Bola Ahmed Tinubu settles down for full attention to the Niger Delta, he will have his hands full.