Hon. Eseme Eyiboh, A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress in Akwa Ibom State and the Chairman, Cross River Basin Development Authority, has said the root cause of underperformance and corruption in the Niger Delta Development Commission NDDC and other public institutions was faulty leadership recruitment.
He, however, regretted that 20 years after its establishment, NDDC was yet to accomplish its mandate which was to bridge the development gap in the region.
His words, ‘the Leadership recruitment process in NDDC is faulty. I have repeatedly said that you don’t pick a stammerer to lead your choir. Choir is something you need someone with a level of moderation to sing
“You can also not ask a Leprous man or a cripple to go and run across the highway. It’s dangerous.
“So when you begin to see a multiplicity of these we keep recruiting wrong people into the right places and sometimes the right people into wrong places. When you do, these institutions would be weak. They are not self-regulatory, you now have garbage in and garbage out.
“When we talk about NDDC which is an interventionist agency, we must also look at the vision for its creation. What was the contemplation of government when it created NDDC?
“It was because of disorderliness, the development gap and the militancy and all those things that disrupted social order in the region. Now the government said let have an interventionist agency and they came up with a master plan.
“How long has this master plan been implemented? Look at the East-West road, it stops at Onna, from Eket down there is nothing to write home about. I don’t want to be contradicted that Eket is the biggest contributor to what Akwa Ibom State is in the oil bracket. You cannot take this away.
“But starting from Oron to Eket there is nothing to show for it, the roads are bad and what Government at that time have as monuments have been destroyed”
