By Our Reporter
The national working committee, NWC, of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, seems to be at loggerheads with the managing director of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, Dr Samuel Ogbuku, over his alleged refusal to discuss the agency’s agenda for the region with it.
An NWC source from the Niger Delta region told journalists that the party was out to ensure success for President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope agenda. He said that, in that wise, members of the NWC from the nine oil-bearing states of Abia, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross Rivers, Delta, Edo, Imo, Ondo and Rivers, and the party’s zonal chairmen of the SouthEast, SouthSouth and SouthWest regions, had sought a meeting with the NDDC helmsman to know how the Commission had fared so far under his tenure.
The source noted that the NWC members’ move was prompted by widespread hints in the ND area that the impact of the agency under his tenure had not been up to par, given the needs of the region.
The committee, therefore, sought the meeting so as to verify that information, particularly given that a lot of money had been pumped into the agency. The party, the source insisted, felt it had a duty to ensure that the region was not being short-changed, for one reason or the other, by the management of the NDDC.
The move for the meeting was, however, said to have been shunned by the MD. This reportedly angered the members who bemoaned such a posture, given the fact that the NDDC MD’s position was facilitated by a mandate from the ruling party’s administration and the NWC members from the zone. He argued that the members, as party men, were keen on the success of the Tinubu administration and should not “fold their hands and watch him destroy the hopes of millions of Niger Delta citizens who obviously deserve better than what is presently obtained.”
He said that the NWC members had been inundated with claims of the staff of the Commission being owed salaries and contractors stopping work on several turnkey projects scattered all over the region.
“This has prompted the NWC members to adopt measures to get Ogbuku to respond to their request for the parley,” adding that they were “responsible to the people who voted us and whose welfare we must protect if we are to seek these votes in future elections.”
