It is pedestrian knowledge that Tajudeen Abbas, Speaker of the House of Representatives, recently constituted 134 standing committees in the green chamber where Ibori Suenu, a People’s Democratic Party (PDP) member from Delta, was announced Chairman of Niger Delta Development Commission (NNDC) committee. This announcement of standing Committees going by reports, is in line with the provisions of the constitution and the house standing rules which empower the parliament to, through the committees, carry out oversight functions on government agencies and programmes and address specific issues of national importance.
While the latest appointment is celebrated, it will essentially not be wrong or hasty to conclude that as representative of Ethiope Federal Constituency at the Green Chambers and a two- term lawmaker at the Delta state House of Assembly, Ibori Suenu, is at home with what the people of the region stoically endures and apparently capped with necessary experience needed to spur members of her Committee to a level of over sight performance that will reverse the present predicaments facing the region and promote, intensify resource generation that all federating units can utilize.
However, considering the fact that factors that impede the development of the region these years are still alive and active, it will elicit the question as to if the Committee is aware that they are faced with a very big task ahead of them that requires in-depth study of concepts and approaches of the past failed initiatives targeted at solving the region’s environmental and socioeconomic problems in order to design effective, efficient and accountable oversight procedure geared toward realizing the emergence of the Niger Delta region of our dreams.
As a background, for over five decades, since oil was discovered in commercial quantity in the region, ‘a fierce war has been raging between ethnic and social forces in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. As a direct consequence, a long dark shadow has been cast on the efforts of successive administrations to improve the well-being and economic development of the region’s individual, peoples and community’.
The people of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria have been cheated for a protracted period in ways that rendered restitution a costly process: inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, poor healthcare facilities. It is a region where communal rights to a clean environment and access to clean water supplies are being violated in the Niger Delta. By its admission, the oil companies have abandoned thousands of polluted sites in the region. Aquifers and other water supply sources are being adversely affected by industrial or other activities.
For those unfamiliar with the acronym, ‘NDDC’, it is simply a contraction of the Niger Delta Development Commission, a federal government agency established by Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in the year 2000 with the sole mandate of developing the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria.
From the above, it becomes evident that the commission was designed to play a key role in attracting development, building infrastructure and providing well-planned fiscal incentives and, most importantly, establishing good relationships with oil and gas-producing communities while creating sound policies that will fundamentally enable private enterprises to operate successfully in the area.
It, however, becomes not only disturbing but a contradiction of the sort that the same NDDC, which was created to achieve the above objective, had regrettably gone astray with consistency in poor performance, thereby creating a frosty relationship between itself and the oil and gas host communities.
From the deep sense of crisis that has characterized/trailed NDDC existence, which ranges from protracted inability to deliver legacy projects (infrastructures) to the people of the region in the past 23years of its existence to being referred to by many commentators as an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) set up for the settlement/compensation of failed politicians within and outside the region, one important fact that must not be hidden from the Ibori Suenu led House Committee is that the NDDC they inherited enjoys more burden than goodwill.
To, therefore, grasp and find solution to the critical issues plaguing the region , it is important for Ibori led Committee to recognize that, bringing a radical improvement or achieving sustainable development in a way that both protects the rights and opportunities of coming generations will not be possible if members of the Committee present themselves as all-knowing, more generous, more nationalistic, selfless, more honest or kind, more intelligent, good looking or well-briefed than other Niger Delta stakeholders.
Rather, it is vital at this stage that they formulate questions in a way that will facilitate the discovery of solutions to; what impeded the development of the region all these years; ask solution-oriented questions as to why the current legislative framework is not providing a strong source of remedy for individuals and communities negatively impacted by oil exploration and production activities in the coastal communities; find out why it is not effective and enforceable; why the framework as a legal solution to the issues of oil-related violations is not very comprehensive.
Part of that approach needed for optimum result will entail Honourable Ibori Suenu led Committee departing the old order in their oversight function with the Niger Delta Ministry and NDDC. The Committee must imbibe the culture of writing down at all times each point of uncertainty, estimate the probability of a positive or a negative outcome in each case, and access the probable impact on the overall result if each decision should end in a negative outcome.
The Committee needs to creatively liaise with the Niger Delta Ministry to find a solution and fast to the challenges created by the Niger Delta Development Commissions (NDDC), and that of the Presidential Amnesty counterpart. To explain this point, while the coastal dwellers have in recent times perceived and referred to NDDC as ‘a city boy’ that has nothing to do with coastal regions, the pronounced threat created by the Presidential Amnesty office inability to create jobs for the large army of professionally trained ex-militants have characterized the entire programme as a horse shaking off flies with its tails oblivious of the fact that as soon as it stops to flail its tail, the flies will come back more determined to snipe.
More important than the above, the Committee need to step beyond NDDC as a Commission and discover why the much celebrated Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021, which was signed into law by former President Muhammadu Buhari, and targeted at solving the challenges in the nation’s petroleum sector, and turn Niger delta region, particularly host communities to a zone of peace in their relationship with Crude Oil prospecting and exploration companies, has contrary to expectation became the fundamental line of conflict between the operators and the host communities?
Further necessitating the urgency of having the Act amended is the fact that the challenge of ‘ambiguity, interpretation and imprecision in the law is so profound’.
Analysts are particularly not happy with the Act’s unclear posture on whether host community development trust obligations are additional to existing community levies (such as the Niger Delta development levy) or will be an aggregation of those levies.
Another major area of ‘interest ‘’ the Committee must watch as it calls for urgent amendment is the fiscal framework of PIA which highlights penalties for gas flaring arising from midstream operations, noting that revenues from these penalties will accrue to the Midstream and Downstream.
Aside from the fact that the law was more interested in income generation for the government through payment of fines/penalties by the operators and has no protection for the host communities, who are the real victims of pollution arising from gas flaring, most important reason in my view that calls for the amendment of the Act is to empower it with well codified power to permanently address the bitter tablets of oppression the people of Niger Delta region have taken for the period under review of which the neglect has accumulated interest and its cost for this nation has become substantial in financial and human terms.
Finally, as the author of this piece, it is my opinion that Niger Delta region needs a PIA that will introduce fundamental change of direction and usher in radical improvement and efficiency in relationship between crude oil exploration and producing companies and their host communities.
