Ekere: NDDC’s 7,000MW Power Pool Will Reduce Tariffs in N’Delta

Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Niger Delta Development Commission, Mr. Nsima Ekere spoke to Ejiofor Alike on the commission’s new development initiatives for the oil-rich region as well as the challenges. Excerpts:

Your contractors were always complaining that NDDC doesn’t pay them for work done. And even the beneficiaries of your scholarship scheme; they always complain and these prompted the senate to pass a resolutions sometimes. Is it deliberate that NDDC is perceived as a chronic debtor?

We discovered that there was a lot of overtrading in NDDC; they had much more projects than they can pay for with the available funds; that is why we have also said going forward in our budget, instead of creating new projects, 70 per cent of the budget would be dedicated to servicing ongoing projects, while only 30 per cent would be used for salaries, overhead and new projects. When you look at the NDDC Act, there is a financial provision which states how much and how the funding of NDDC would be structured. If NDDC was able to get all of the money that we are supposed to get under the Act, you will see that there would be enough money to pay for those contracts.

As we speak today, we have a shortfall of about N1.7 – 1.8 trillion from the federal government contribution to the NDDC. In other words, the federal government owes us that much money. If that much money was paid, why wouldn’t contractors be paid? So, it is basically a funding problem. I have about N5 billion in a month. By the time you pay salaries and overheads maybe you have N3 billion remaining. How can you use N3 billion and pay N1 trillion to contractors. We are using bare hands; we are working with your bare knuckles as it where, so it is a serious constraint of funds in NDDC and that is why we have a lot of those problems. But we believe that that would improve. We believe that the federal government would make good on their contributions. Fortunately Mr. President approved that the Ministers of Finance and Budget & Planning should sit with us and resolve these issues. We are hoping that with that we would be able to make some progress once money comes in and the contractors would be paid.

How about the NDDC Post-Graduate Scholarship Programme?
We have paid up all NDDC scholars. When we came in, we discovered that there was a lot of hanky-panky in the scholarship thing. For instance, a master’s programme, is supposed to last one year – 18 months in the maximum. But you will see that an NDDC scholar who won the scholarship in 2007 to go and do a master’s programme in the US or the UK will still be claiming scholarship in 2017. Do you understand what I mean? And we had several cases like this. Somebody will win the NDDC scholarship, would be in Nigeria, not in any school anywhere in the world and he is claiming money. So, that is why it was necessary that we freeze that process, because we needed to confirm what really the issues were, who the genuine students were but unfortunately in that process some genuine students suffered. We regret very much that some genuine students had their money withheld for a while during that verification process. But all of that has been done now and we have paid up to date.

You mentioned that one of your challenges is this mentality of self entitlement by the people of the Niger Delta. So, how are you dealing with it?
I have always said to the youths and to stakeholders anytime I am opportuned to address them, that it is better to think of sustainable economic model that we can use to empower our people. I don’t believe that you should just keep dashing them money; giving money to these people come. There was a time at NDDC when there were like three – three protests every week, because when they come for the protest, when you are dispersing them they expect to be given some money. So, anytime somebody is broke in his house, they will come and protest, so that something can come.

I stopped that. I made protest unattractive. So, when they come to protest, you allow them stay there the whole day, and you don’t give them money when they are going. So, gradually, the number of protests began to reduce. So, the protests you see now, are protests that are sponsored by some politicians for their reasons. We know a couple; they had to sponsor protest, but ordinarily the genuine protesters that used to come on their own spontaneously have drastically reduced – almost stopped because they know that when they come, there will be no money to pay the buses that they hired to come unlike what used to happen in the past.

I believe that it is better to think of sustainable economic models, sustainable economic activities to engage our youths with and that is why we are coming up with what we call The Niger Delta Enterprise Centres for startups, so that people with bright ideas can come into those centres. It is different from what we used to do before. Before now, we used to do a lot of trainings and empowerment programmes.

In other words, we called people, train them in various skills and at the end of the training give them starter packs to go and start their businesses. For instance, we train somebody in some skillarea, give him a starter pack and six months, one year down the line you see the guy still unemployed; he is standing at the gate of NDDC. What used to happen for most of them is that when they get those starter packs at the end of the training, they will sell it off and collect the money and after that they will come back and look for more. But with the enterprise hub that we are thinking of doing now, we should be able to address that challenge.

We are starting with one centre for now. We are partnering with SMEDAN. SMEDAN had what they call Industrial Development Centres (IDCs) all over the country before now. In the Niger Delta region, they have six IDCs. So, in partnership with SMEDAN, we will take their IDCs and develop them into enterprise hubs that we would use to engage our young people and help them to become entrepreneurs of their own. We think it would be a better way to engage our people; create jobs and wealth for our people rather than the training that we were doing initially. Secondly, we are also in partnership with NEXIM Bank to set up a N5 billion export facility, targeted strictly at the agricultural value chain. The idea is to help the farmers that we identify in the region grow their capacities and find market outside the country so that their products can be processed and exported and foreign exchange would be realised. So these are some of the things that we have being doing slightly differently from the past. It is good to build roads, it is good to build bridges, it is good to build infrastructure, but we are also looking at how we can build the people.

We are not totally forgetting training. We are partnering Innosson, one of the manufacturing outfits in Nigeria, to train a hundred youths. We are beginning to train a hundred people annually on automobile related skills. So they will go to the facilities and learn how to assembly cars and learn how to fix cars and learn how to maintain cars and a couple of other things.

You emerged the winner of the 2017 Sun Award in the Public Service category and the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, also awarded you honorary doctorate degree, precisely on Saturday, March 3, 2018. These awards are coming in your 15th month at the helm. Can you walk us through your time at the Commission?

I always tell people; we were a bit lucky; indeed luckier than other Boards or Managements that have come into NDDC. And I say this because it took about five months from when we were nominated by Mr. President before we finally assumed office. So, that gave us enough time to do some bit of stock taking; trying to find out what NDDC is like; what the issues are; what the problems are and then fashion out the strategy to attack those issues. And that is why we came up with what we call the 4R Strategy to reposition and restructure the NDDC delivery for maximum impact, maximum delivery.

We set out to restructure the balance sheet, because on assumption of office, we discovered that the NDDC balance sheet was outdated. There were projects that were non-performing and had been on the book of the Commission as far as 10 to 15 years. What is the point in carrying all of these projects over? So, we decided that we must restructure the balance sheet. That has led us to the cancellation of non-performing contracts. We have cancelled it twice now; the first one involved about 624 projects worth over N200 billion and the second batch of project that we have cancelled was about 400 projects worth a little over N100 billion. So effectively we have being able to take outoverN300 billion from the balance sheet of the Commission and that is a lot.

And then also in line with that particular area of focus, restructuring the balance sheet, we have also ensured that going forward, we dedicated 70 per cent of the budget to ongoing projects so that we can complete ongoing projects started by previous administrations. It is just the balance of 30 per cent that we use for overhead, salaries and new projects. The idea is instead of us to keep increasing the balance sheet – which had contingent liabilities of more than N1 trillion when we arrived – through awards of new projects, we decided to tune down the quantity of projects that we are initiating. We are aware that there are a lot of demands all over the Niger Delta; a lot of things need to be done. But we can’t keep carrying all of them over otherwise the problem of the past will remain. We would prefer to complete the projects that we have ongoing. We have identified some of them that are priority projects; we want to prioritize them and then concentrate on completing them so that the respective communities can take benefit and enjoy the advantages of these developments.

And then also the second R is to restructure the governance system of the Commission. When we came in we decided to look at the systems and processes of NDDC in order to come up with a policy that allows NDDC to respect the law and follow the laws, extant laws, whatever it is, whatever policies, whatever rules of Government are, whatever they are, NDDC should respect them. So, we decided to streamline the governance system of the place and introduce international best practices, to as much as possible introduce technology in running the organization so that we can have a Commission that meets international best practices in terms of their system and ways of doing things.

The third R is that we restore the Commission back to its core mandate. What is it that government had in mind when it set up NDDC? Over the years we saw that NDDC had started competing with Local Government and State Governments struggling to buy chalk for classrooms, for primary schools and so on and so forth. So we said we would rather do big ticket projects that will aid regional economic integration of the Niger Delta and those are the kinds of projects that would add real values to the Niger Delta. And so, we want to get back to those core things which the Commission was set up to accomplish.

Over the years a lot of good has been done by NDDC. We have built a lot of road, bridges, jetties and so on and so forth. Some of the roads we have done have been ground-breaker: Opening up communities that never imagined that they will see a concrete road. Recently, we were in Delta State where we commissioned some roads in some coastal communities in Olero Creek, in Warri North Local Government. These are some isolated communities on the fringes of the Atlantic Ocean and those were the first concrete paved roads they were seeing for the first time.

The Ogbia – Nembe Road in Bayelsa State wich we are doing in partnership with Shell Development Company is another. Also in Bayelsa, NDDC brought roads to Opukuma in Kolokuma/Opukuma local government area, areas that people thought concrete roads were impossible. And in Akwa Ibom, we have built the longest bridge in the Niger Delta, the Ibeno bridge. You can see these pace-setting interventions both in project and programmes across all the nine Niger Delta States.

But we now want to see how we can concentrate on the kinds of projects that will engender sustainable and comprehensive regional economic integration for the Niger Delta. I am scheduled to be in Ondo State very shortly to flag-off a key regional project. There has been a plan for years now for what is called the coastal road network where all the coastal towns in the country are supposed to be linked by a road network. The designs have been done. It will cost a lot of money too. So, this administration has decided to take it in phases.

We went into Ondo State late last year and signed an MOU with the State Government to build the road from the Ilaje area, which is the oil producing part of Ondo State to link the Ilaje area to Ibeju-Lekki in Lagos. So, a journey that ordinarily takes five hours from Ondo to Lagos, with what we are doing, we will accomplish the same journey in 50 minutes to about one hour. We are flagging off that project shortly with the State Governor.
So these are the kind of things we doing. In Edo State for instance, we are doing a road from Benin to Abraka. Before now, you will see NDDC will go and struggle to build one small street, because one big man or one politician lives there; which is the reason behind some of the problems and criticisms the Commission has received over the years.

We are looking at the bigger picture now. That is why you will see we are thinking of deepening the internet penetration in the Niger Delta. We are working with the Galaxy Backbone on that. We were in Sao Tome and Principe Island off the coast of Nigeria, sometime last year. You see that Sao Tome with a population of about 180,000 people for that whole country, Nigeria has a population of over 200 million, but the same internet capacity that Nigeria as a country has is the same that Sao Tome with a 180,000 people have. So, they have so much internet capacity, which they don’t need and can’t use. So, we went there and had meetings with their Prime Minister and are making arrangement to take the excess capacity that they don’t need. We will use marine cables to bring it into the Niger Delta to feed the entire Niger Delta and then make sure that we deepen the internet connectivity there.

Hopefully with that, we would be able to have a lot of IT-based business spring up or even be attracted to the region. These are the kind of things we are thinking of doing now, apart from just building roads, bridges, jetties and shore protections. It is good to do all those things because we need infrastructures, but also we are looking at the soft side things that would help sustainable economic development of the region and then create employment for our youths and keep them employable.

We are also thinking of the Niger Delta Power Pool. The idea is that the Niger Delta region is already very challenged. We have rainfall almost nine to 10 months in a year and over 70 per cent of the region is below sea level. So, ordinarily there is nothing to attract any manufacturing industry to the Niger Delta region apart from those that are coming to extract our natural resources, mainly oil and gas. When you are talking of the real economy, manufacturing, there is nothing to attract, because ordinarily the area is not attractive.

So, we are thinking of doing something that will deliberatively attract manufacturing concerns and businesses to the Niger Delta. So, we thought of the Niger Delta Power Pool project. Interestingly also, you notice that the cost of power in the Niger Delta is more expensive than in an areas like Lagos. Why? The reason is because the manufacturing industries, commercial activities – commercial houses subsidise the cost of power for non-commercial consumers.

So, ultimately on the average, the cost is lower in Lagos. But in the Niger Delta area, it is very high. So, we are thinking of the Niger Delta Power Pool project, which will generate 7,000 megawatts of electricity for the Niger Delta area. We will now use that power to build dedicated industrial clutters throughout the region. For now we are thinking of three per state, that is, one per senatorial district, but we know that is quiet ambitious. So, we will have to phase it and maybe reduce it slightly. We are still at the design stage now and interestingly we have received a lot of encouragement from the US EXIM Bank. They are even asking to pay for the cost of the feasibility studies.

Anyway, we think that by the time we are able to do and execute this power project, the cost of power in the Niger Delta will be substantially reduced and then hopefully manufacturing concerns would be attracted to the area. Don’t forget that we are also talking about developing industrial clutters and parks and with enough security to make it attractive for businesses to come into the area.

We are also thinking of the Niger Delta Development Bank, to support the developmental efforts of the Commission and the growth initiatives of Niger Delta people and communities. So we are thinking of these bigger things. That is why we said we will take the Commission back to its core mandate so that we can be able to deliver to our people a region that is secure, safe and economically self-sustaining. And then generally the 4th R in the reformed program is to generally reaffirm our commitment to doing what is right and proper. It is a mind thing, just talk to people’s minds, talk to people’s ideas and let them know that it is just best to do correctly and do things the right ways. And we believe that if we can successfully implement these reform strategies that we would leave NDDC far better at the time we leave then when we met it.

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