NDDC board: Don’t heed AGF’s advice on tenure extension, IYC tells Buhari

The Ijaw Youth Council Worldwide has vowed to resist alleged plans by the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, SAN, to extend the tenure of the Managing Director and Chairman of the Board of the Niger Delta Development Commission, whose tenures end this month.
President, IYC, Mr. Eric Omare, said in Warri that the council had got reliable information that Mallami had written a memo to President Muhammadu Buhari advising him to extend the tenure of the present board of the NDDC.
Omare, who described the alleged action of the AGF as “unconstitutional and satanic,” vowed that the IYC would use all resources available to it to resist the extension of the tenure of the NDDC board, stressing that, by the NDDC Act, no state could produce the managing director and the board chairman twice.
He, therefore, called on President Buhari to ensure that he reversed the decision and also begin plans to appoint new members of the NDDC and noted that anything short of that would amount to injustice.
Omare said, “Malami Abubakar is at it again. I am sure you are all aware of the Niger Delta Development Commission that was established in the year 2000. One of the basic principles of the NDDC is that the MD and chairman are statutorily based on rotation. For the chairman of the NDDC, it is based on alphabetical order; that is why it started with Abia, then Akwa Ibom and then Bayelsa, on temporary basis, before it got to Cross River and now it is the turn of Delta State.
“But it will shock Nigerians to know that on the tenure of the present chairman of the board that is supposed to end by this month, Abubakar Malami has written a memo to the President, that the chairman should be reappointed for another four-year tenure, contrary to the statutory position of the NDDC Act that it is based on rotation.
“Let me emphasise this point, by the provision of the NDDC Act, especially section 3,4 and 12, the MD and Chairman of the NDDC cannot come from any state twice.”
The IYC president accused Malami of playing the script of the cabal in Aso Rock, saying that some of the people surrounding the President were taking advantage of his old age to perpetrate their corrupt plans.