The Progressive Impact Organisation for Community Development (PRIMORG) says barely a week after receiving the forensic audit report of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), Nigerians have continued to demand prompt action by President Muhammadu Buhari against officials, contractors, and individuals indicted by the report, which exposed brazen criminality and fraud in the execution of 13,777 projects.
President Buhari had in October 2019 ordered forensic auditing of the commission due to reports of endemic corruption since its establishment, but received the audit report last Thursday.
Speaking during an anti-corruption radio programme, Public Conscience on Radio, produced by the Progressive Impact Organization for Community Development, PRIMORG, on Wednesday in Abuja, the Executive Director, Citizens Advocacy For Social & Economic Rights, Frank Tietie, revealed that his expectation and that of the people from the Niger Delta region is to see President Buhari-led federal government speedily employ all legal means in arresting all and sundry implicated by the report; seize their ill-gotten properties, monies and return them to the people.
Tietie said: “We don’t want time to be wasted. I am looking forward to properties that will be temporarily and finally forfeited to the federal government, sold and the money taken back to the NDDC.
“We are looking at a situation where current members of the National Assembly, members of the Federal Executive Council, federal public servants, and civil servants will be arrested immediately and imprisoned.
“We want a speedy trial. We want to see people sent to prison. Seize their properties, sell their properties, give the money back to the NDDC,”
He commended PRIMORG for its boldness in bringing such discourse of national importance to public knowledge, while disclosing that his rights group would continue to urge citizens to be alert on government spending and hold their leaders accountable.
Toeing the same line, Umuakpo Ovie who spoke from Delta State said that a well-constituted board of the commission would reduce the malfeasance that has impoverished the people of the region.
Ovie disclosed that going forward, people from the region will hold leaders accountable, “just as we are agitating for President Buhari to act on the forensic audit report, that is how we must come together to hold political leaders, traditional leaders, and opinion leaders accountable and ask them questions.
“The criminality is too much, how can they spend N6 trillion, and today there is no development in the region?” He lamented.