The Niger Delta Civil Society Coalition (NDCSC) has called on the Federal Government to probe the activities of the Niger Delta Development Commission which it has accused of corrupt practices.
In a statement issued by its chairman, Anyakwee Nsirimovu, the group said rather than intervene and improve the deplorable situation in the Niger Delta, the commission had been adding to it.
Said the group: “Moved by the misfortunes occasioned by the relentless retardation of progress by a barbarous NDDC leadership in plundering and bringing extreme poverty, destruction and death to the peoples of the Niger Delta region, rather than intervening to develop and sustain the people, we make bold to say that these characters who have fearlessly engaged in open corrupt activities have broken the most solemn agreements that enabled their existence in the first place.”
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The group said further: “We call on the federal government to take this latest rude awakening most seriously.
“The supervising ministry must move beyond lamentation and deal decisively with the chronic wrong doing of this so-called intervention agency and the personnel involved: the monsters who have infested the region, that continue to drench it in blood by reaping from where they never sowed, be urgently cast out and given the punishment equal to the enormity of their perfidy.
“It is time we begin to eradicate what has become a permanent feature of the commission, which simply translates into a mission to rob and decimate the unsuspecting peoples of the region.
“For the avoidance of any doubt, NDDC has never truly been that intervention agency that was set out to improve and strengthen democratic institutions through the acceleration of economic and social developments, thus rapidly bringing about a substantial and steady increase in the average income in order to narrow the gap between the standard of living in the Niger Delta region, as envisaged by its founders.
“Instead, the region has remained grounded into retrogression and abject poverty at every given point.
“It has remained that agency where management bicker against one another, contracts are shared without due process, mobilisations collected,< non-performance and absence of accountability are all pervading.”
