… Owes Workers N78bn
… N2.25bn Fraud Exposed
The management of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC has concluded plans to terminate the appointment of over eight hundred (800) staff of the commission.
This was made known to our reporter by a top official of the commission. According to him the retrenchment exercise will affect the workers in the traffic control department.
Information revealed that the traffic control department is mostly made of up youths from the Niger Delta sub-region. Last week they intend to stage a protest against their planned sack but the management of the commission intervened, which propelled them to jettison the idea of the protest.
One of the staff in the traffic control department told our correspondent that the acting Managing Director of the NDDC, Mrs. Ibim Semenitari is hell bent of terminating their appointment, because they were employed by the previous administration, which was loyal to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan.
The traffic officer who pleaded anonymity hinted this weekly that their salary for the month is N150,000 per person, but unfortunately for them the said amount is drastically reduced to N70,000 without any cogent reason.
“To us this is an injustice of the highest order. Our fixed take home salary for the month is N150,000 per staff in our department. But the NDDC is only giving us N70,000. Now we can ask: where is the remaining sum of N80,000? Mrs. Ibim Semenitari should answer this question.
“The management should explain this because in the department, we are about 800 workers”, the traffic officer asserted.
He maintained that with the current illegal salary cut, the management owes them outstanding arrears of Seven Hundred and Sixty-eight million naira (768,000,000). According to him, the traffic control staff are not happy with the management of the NDDC over their salary reductiont, and called on the appropriate authorities to look into the matters and not to be treated with levity.
Thus our investigation further shown that the traffic control staff who commenced work last year, had their appointment letters back dated to the year 2013.
Hence over N2.25bn naira has been secretly channeled to private pockets and personal bank accounts through this illegal back dating of the appointment.
Information reaching our newsroom exposed the can of worms and revealed the skeleton in the cupboard of the commission. Cloud of financial scam and fraud has shrouded the entire commission. We are reliably informed that the secret behind the planned termination of the 800 traffic control officers is for the Acting MD to replace them with All Progressives Congress APC loyalists. Some traffic control officers who spoke to our correspondent vowed to resist the acting MD to flush them out and bring in APC members.
All efforts to contact the Acting MD failed.
Niger-Delta activist, Ankiio Briggs has kicked against the appointment of Ibim Semenitari as the Acting Managing Director of the Niger-Delta Development Commission, NDDC.
Briggs while speaking with newsmen at her office in Port Harcourt said the slot of the MD of the NDDC was meant to be occupied by Akwa-Ibom and not Rivers State.
While calling on the Federal Government to correct the appointments being made at the NDDC, Briggs said the appointment of Semenitari may create friction between Rivers and Akwa-Ibom.
According to her, “Removing Dan-Abia and replacing him with a Rivers indigene is not the right thing to do. This slot that Semenitari is sitting on today is actually Akwa-Ibom slot.
“Rivers State has had its own slot of the Managing Director position; two people from Rivers State in a 4year term has taken that position. To give it back to a Rivers person is like a military take-over of the NDDC. Even if you want to remove Dan-Abia, you should replace him with somebody from Akwa-Ibom.
“This is wrong. It is meant to create problem between Rivers and Akwa Ibom state. This act of putting a Rivers person in the slot that is meant for Akwa Ibom is meant to create friction and Niger-Delta people must see it like that.”
The Niger-Delta rights activist also said the protection of pipelines should be the role of the security operatives and not the NDDC, adding that protection of pipelines was not part of the law that set up the Commission.###
