Senators have just fast-tracked a bill to establish a new South-South Development Commission, SSDC, despite the long-standing existence of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC.

Yesterday, the SSDC Bill passed second reading on the floor of the Senate. Lawmakers also proposed amendments to the new North-West Development Commission, NWDC, and South-East Development Commission, SEDC, Acts earlier passed by the National Assembly.

A North-East Development Commission (established in 2017) already exists, which means that every geopolitical zone in Nigeria – except the North-Central – now has its own development commission. And it is surely only a matter of time before an NCDC materialises.

What on earth is going on?!

At a time when the country is deeply wounded and limping towards a socio-economic future that looks far from bright, legislators are creating totally unnecessary new organisations that will consume billions of increasingly scarce petrodollars and add little or no value.

The establishment of NDDC made sense, given that the oil-producing region had been aggressively neglected and desperately needed more government support to counter rising militancy. Ditto NEDC, which is situated in the heart of a region that has been messed up by deadly Islamic terrorists and is full of internally displaced refugees.

But what good reason is there to go on a multiplication spree and create special intervention agencies in other zones?

OK so there is no part of Nigeria that is healthy and thriving. Every single zone has its fair share of extreme poverty, educational deficits, health sector nightmares and environmental challenges.

Every single zone is under attack from criminals, whether they be insurgents or kidnappers or bandits or cultists or killer herdsmen.

But the NDDC and NEDC can barely justify their existences because they are riddled with corruption, inefficiently managed and cost far more than they cure. And the government will NOT solve the above problems – extreme poverty etc – by generating more expensive bureaucracies that will mostly favour politicians and their cronies.

I am also at a loss to understand why my home zone needs an additional development commission. Why add SSDC to NDDC?

Legislators say that the NDDC Act will be amended and that NDDC’s name will be changed so NDDC can thenceforth include all oil-bearing communities in Nigeria, irrespective of their geographical locations.

According to the sponsor of the SSDC bill, Senator Asuquo Ekpenyong (APC, Cross River South): The NDDC undertakes “multi-regional” functions and extends to states outside the Niger Delta like Abia, Ondo and Imo because they produce oil.

Ekpenyong has also said that the SSDC will provide even development for all the states in the zone, irrespective of whether they produce oil…and that it will “resolve ecological problems and other development challenges in all the South-South states other than what happens in the Niger Delta areas”.

Ekpenyong added that it would be unfair to create development commissions for other zones of the country and exclude the South-South because it already has NDDC when some of the states in the other zones are also benefiting from the allocations of the NDDC.

Former Bayelsa governor, Senator Henry Seriake Dickson, supported Ekpenyong, pointing out that: “Cross River State virtually gets nothing from NDDC, but with the South- South commission, it will now benefit; this is also applicable to many other communities in the South-South.

“The point is that we have to draw a demarcation between a resource-based commission, which is what the NDDC is, and a geopolitical zone commission like the proposed SSDC.”

But these are very weak arguments! There are already numerous overlaps between NDDC’s responsibilities and state/Federal Government responsibilities. And it is OBVIOUS that NDDC and SSDC’s functions will overlap and be duplicated on many levels.   

Meanwhile, Senator Suleiman Abdulrahman-Kawu (NNPP, Kano South) mentioned Gombe, Bauchi, Kogi, Lagos, Ogun and others as states that have oil deposits and should be part of a renamed NDDC in the future, once the NDDC Act has been amended.

Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, who presided over the session, concluded that “any state that produces oil in commercial quantities in the future will automatically be part of the NDDC.”

I know some of the above senators and can confirm that they are highly intelligent.

Long story short: I don’t understand why they cannot see what I so clearly see, being that it is insane and somewhat daft to champion the proliferation of totally unnecessary development commissions when they should be a) worrying about a rapidly failing state, b) ferociously focusing on more pressing priorities like the “japa” exodus of demoralised skilled citizens and c) thinking about how to take care of those who are still stuck here by maximizing the effectiveness of existing institutions they were elected to oversee!

The last thing Nigeria needs at the moment – regular folks are literally starving because of rampant inflation and abysmal governance! – is diversionary tactics, meaningless symbolic gestures and a whole bunch of flashy new office buildings that are manned by venal civil servants and cynical greedy political appointees.

The Nigerian elite is very lucky because the Nigerian masses and middle classes are amazingly docile and forgiving. I would strongly advise the elite to not assume that the status quo will last forever.

Also, is it not the same old Niger Delta oil that will pay for these essentially parasitical new commissions?

And by the way, when is the government going to start pushing and enabling states to increase their internally generated revenues?

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