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The sacked acting managing director of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and his team have reportedly awarded emergency contracts worth over one trillion naira in just seven months of 2019.

According to Business Day, this is said to be against an annual budget of about N400bn. This was disclosed by the acting executive director, projects, Cairo Ojougboh. He said the emergency contracts system was aimed at attending to some urgent situations through some contracts. “In 2017, the NDDC awarded a total of 201 emergency contracts valued at N100.39Bn; in 2018, total 1,057 emergency contracts valued at N162.68Bn were awarded; and in just seven months of 2019, it awarded a total of 1,921 emergency contracts valued at N1.07trn,” he said. “We are talking about a total of over N1.3trillion in less than three years. The yearly budget of the NDDC is hardly above N400Bn and a situation where contracts that do not qualify for emergencies were fraudulently awarded to over one trillion naira value in less than one year amounts to not only stealing from the pulpit but stealing the entire pulpit. Meanwhile according to reports more revelations are unfolding following the order of President Muhammadu Buhari for a forensic audit of the NDDC. There have been claims and confirmed reports that many NDDC projects were left uncompleted in oil-rich states of the country due to non-release of funds by the then leadership of the commission. Godswill Apkabio, the minister of Niger Delta Affairs, said that some firms, especially banks, who are scared of being indicted are now coming forward to make refunds to the NDDC. Akpabio specifically said: “I know of a bank that came to say they have $70 million from 2006, one also came to say N170 million had been abandoned, I’ve forgotten in which administrations in the last 11 years, they said they are ready to refund. “I think people were treating the place as an ATM, where you just walk in there to go and pluck money and go away, I don’t think they were looking at it as an interventionist agency.”