By Sebastine Ebhuomhan
It will appear that some people really love to live life shamelessly in the kleiglights of drama, or if you like, controversy. If not, how else can we reconcile the claims of those calling for a probe of the presidential constitution and announcement of a new board for the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC)?
Can the Presidency really probe a list it nominated, announced and sent to the National Assembly for screening? Are you now by anyway inferring that Mr President doesn’t know what he is doing?
If President Buhari for any reason that is only known to him and his aides decide to step down and re-compose a list it initially sent out before, what is the error or offence linking such presidential decision to any member of the board, none of whom has ever managed the board before, historically, or an ex-governor of a state that has never had a say on how NDDC is managed or or its contracts are awarded, just like it is being alleged about present governors?
People; yes, the people with hidden, evil agenda are the ones that are unnecessarily being mischeavious with a promotion of half truths in a rather straight forward matter and stoking avoidable tension.
Even before it’s screening, membership of the nominated Dr Pius Odubu-led NDDC Board had been depleted with the nomination of a member to head NDDC’s Caretaker Management, a formation of the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, who directly supervises the NDDC.
So, if President Muhammadu Buhari in his wisdom as the man on whose table the buck stops now decides to recompose the NDDC Board, since the caretaker contraption will not last forever, it is simply because it has become a necessity, bearing in mind that the membership were no longer complete when they were screened.
Nothing, I repeat nothing, has ever been inferred by Mr President’s speech, action or body language to impugn the integrity, ability and capability of the nominated members of the new board of Dr Pius Odubu and Dr Bernard Okumagba, who majority of Niger Delta youth, elders and stakeholders and NASS are rooting to see being sworn into office immediately.
By the way, the probe of past NDDC Boards was neither warranted nor has anything thing to do with the present or past activities of any member of the new board.
In spite of a subdued wolf cry over the matter, in which Charles Idahosa, an ex-Commissioner and former governorship aspirant negatively linked his former boss, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole and Dr Pius Odubu to the meritorious nomination of the NDDC new Board in a newspaper report pushed this week through his well-known hatchet writer, the popularity of President Buhari’s decision, commendation of Mr President and the great expectations for the Odubu-led Board to be recomposed and immediately sworn into office have neither dampened nor reduced.
To say the least, Mr Idahosa’s garulity, baseless rants and fallacious claims are just mere display of arrogant, greedy, immature, cut-throat, backstabbing, nepotistic, occultic and violent politics that has become the norm and past time of the present occupants of Edo State Government House, whose stock-in-trade is a syndrome to pull down any Edo State citizen nominated for federal appointment from outside of Governor Godwin Obaseki’s All Progressives Congress (APC) faction.
Indeed, what else can you expect from a political harlot or parasite, who was once described in the most uncomplimentary words by the incumbent man that he is now protecting and abusing his old friends for?
Sebastine EBHUOMHAN is an award winning Nigerian journalist based in Abuja.
