NDDC Board: Niger Delta Women Give FG One-week Ultimatum
Scores of women from the Niger Delta region have threatened to march round the streets of Port Harcourt as well as the corporate headquarters of the Niger Delta Development Commission naked if the President Muhammadu Buhari, fails to inaugurate a substantive board of the commission within seven days.
The women, including activists, opinion leaders and professionals across the nine states of the region, under the auspices of Wailing Women of Niger Delta (WWND) lamented that the people of the region had been taken for granted for too long while those they looked up to had let them down.
The women in a statement in Port Harcourt on Monday were accompanied by some members of Integrity Friends for Truth and Peace Initiative, saying lack of substantive board for NDDC had further impoverished the region insisting that they were hard hit by the hardship.
The President of WWND, Oney Nwadighi, who read the statement in Port Harcourt on Monday said, “”The current running stalemate at the NDDC is due to the noncompliance with the Act establishing the commission and this is a grievous breach of trust.
“The commission has been subjected to sole administratorship for years now particularly at the behest of the current supervision without accountability. We see a clear class conspiracy to privatize the NDDC at the detriment of our people.
“Unfortunately our men and fathers have given up and gone to sleep while our region gropes in the dark of underdevelopment under the current watch.
“On this, we hold Senator Godswill Akpabio, the supervising Minister of the Niger Delta Affairs fully responsible for the grave degeneration and irregularities in the region and the NDDC.
“We demand that the Federal Government should within the next seven days constitute the substantive board of the NDDC including the Governor’s Advisory Council of the Commission in keeping with the relevant provisions of the NDDC Act.
The women, clad in black attires, called on the federal government to publish the forensic audit report of the commission and condemned a grand plot to sustain the ongoing sole administration of NDDC till the end Buhari’s government.
They asked the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Senator Godswill Akpabio to account for all the billions of naira that accrued to NDDC during the two-year period of the current administration.
“Enough is enough. We will not take it. The Federal Government and Senator Godswill Akpabio can no longer take the Niger Delta for a ride. We shall come out naked and insist on our right as the burden bearers of the region. It shall no longer be business as usual. They should get ready to kill us all,” the statement added.
The aggrieved women posited that there were no more excuses to keep delaying the board’s inauguration other than undermining the core mandates of NDDC
