And it came to pass that in January 2023, the Lord heard the cries of the people of the Niger Delta region. He gave them one of their sons, Samuel Ogbuku, to oversee the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). And he has been giving full essence to his name.

The name Samuel is of Hebrew origin and it means, ‘God has heard.’ Truly, in Ogbuku, God heard the plaintive cries of the region. They have cried for development in the region, for peace and for stability in the leadership of the NDDC. Now, they cry no more.

The Niger Delta region harbours in its bowels humungous reserves of oil and gas which for over six decades is being husbanded for huge petro-dollar receipts into the national treasury. But the region has been without development, despoiled and exploited and denied the totems of modernity to justify its contribution to the national purse. There were infrastructure gaps, environmental challenges and general impoverishment of the people of the region.

These were the gaps that the NDDC was created to fill. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s government birthed the NDDC in year 2000 as a special purpose vehicle to speed up growth and development in the region. By 2020, a good 20 years after its formation, that mandate remained a mirage. Huge money came from both government and oil companies. But all the resources, in billions of naira, were frittered away, not by agents of the oil majors but by the elite of the Niger Delta and their briefcase-carrying cronies from outside the region. The region was rendered a wasteland, a famished shadow of its old self.

This prompted an enraged President Muhammadu Buhari to direct that a forensic audit be carried out on the commission for a period covering 2001 to 2019. Vested interests in the NDDC both serving at that time and retired, and their platoon of co-conspirators pulled all strings to frustrate the audit but to no avail. Even the gods of the abused land were angry with the clan of looters. Former minister of the Niger Delta, Senator Godswill Akpabio once described the NDDC as some people’s ATM.

He said: “Some people just collect money from the commission; they have no skill, no capacity for the job but they are awarded contracts and they pocket the money and disappear. We want those money to be accounted for. There must be an end to such situation. 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.”

Upon assuming office as minister on August 21, 2019, Akpabio raised a red flag: There were 12,000 abandoned projects littering the region. The Interim Management Committee, IMC, of the NDDC said that a past NDDC management awarded 1,921 ‘emergency contracts’ at N1.070 trillion in just seven months, against an annual budget of about N400 billion. Contracts that do not qualify as “emergency contracts’ were converted to ‘emergency’; some contracts only existed on paper but cheques were raised for payments. Magic!

In 2015, the then Auditor General of the Federation, Samuel Ukura, said that over N183 billion was missing from the accounts of the NDDC despite denials by officials of the commission. The NDDC was just a nest of scam. How do you justify that a serving senator at that time would have the ‘privilege’ of handling 300 contracts for the NDDC? These are clear incongruities that have reduced the commission to a conduit for milking the people.

In September 2021, Buhari received the report of the forensic audit. It confirmed the suspicion of all: NDDC was a grazing ground for the corrupt and the crooked. Verdict: Bulk of the N6 trillion approved for the NDDC in 18 years went into private pockets.

Buhari was fully briefed on these heists and to halt the rot, he appointed Ogbuku in January 2023 to bring sanity to the commission and development to the region. By hindsight, it has turned out as one of the best appointments ever made by Buhari. Dr. Ogbuku came primed for the job. A man of scholarship, high value quotient, unvarnished integrity; a former student union activist and public relations officer of the influential Ijaw Youth Council, a family pedigree decorated with honour over many generations, Ogbuku understands the nuances and tenor of the people of the region, having himself lived and schooled among them. It was no surprise that President Tinubu gave him a fresh appointment of 4 years; a rarity in the turbulent leadership appointment history of the NDDC. Ogbuku survived the dissolution of the Board by Tinubu because within the few months he was the top gun at NDDC under Buhari, he showed character, competence, capacity and a clear understanding of the needs of the region and the knowhow to deliver on his mandate in alignment with the Renewed Hope vision of President Tinubu.

In just barely two years, Ogbuku has not only stanched the financial hemorrhage at NDDC, he has delivered development with quality projects cutting across roads, bridges, environment-friendly electrification of towns and rural communities, healthcare, education (typified by infrastructure, capacity building, scholarships: local and overseas), transportation (including through the waterways), among other needs of the region. And he was smart enough to undertake the completion of abandoned legacy projects for the good of the people. The digitalisation of operations at NDDC also caused a cessation to fraudulent activities in contracting and procurement. This brought a culture of transformational service delivery as against the old order of transactional underhand dealings that turned the commission to a few people’s ATM.

Suddenly, there is stability in the leadership of NDDC. Credit to Buhari for first appointing a Samuel who fits the vision both in symbolism and essence. Greater credit to Tinubu, a proven headhunter who retained him and offered him a fresh mandate of 4 years. Ogbuku represents Tinubu’s Renewed Hope in the Niger Delta. The price for peace in the region is development. And Ogbuku is delivering that equitably.