A group known as Organizing for Change Campaign has called for the reconstitution of the National Assembly Joint Committees on the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), conducting the ongoing probe of financial malfeasance and other activities in the commission.
The group in a statement signed by its Executive Director, Muhammed Galadanchi, said there were some measure of inter-personal bickering, animosities, mixed interests’-aggregation and emotive appeals, characterizing the positions of some members of the joint committees, directed at scoring some self-seeking and cheap political gains.
“These call for urgent reasons for the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the Federal House of Representatives to consider the outright re-constitution of the NASS Joint committees on the Niger Delta probe panel, bringing on board, fresh hands without any pre-conceived thought-processes or vested political interests.
“Fresh hands, men and women of great virtues, devoid of any corruption allegations or tendencies, in order to have a clean job schedule that is either driven by unstructured emotive appeals, vested or mixed interests-aggregation.
“It’s our view that the current members of the probe panel may also be culpable of the same corrupt allegations they have set out to probe or are investigating. From the standpoint of rationale reasoning and natural justice and even from the court of public opinion, all the members of the probe panel, appear to be indicted, given the general world-view of great majority of Nigerians, who have been espousing their individual and collective views on the ongoing NASS–NDDC crisis,” he said.
Galadanchi said the group’s position on the lingering crisis in the probe is anchored on the dictum that: “those who must come to equity, must come with clean hands”.
“The President Muhammadu Buhari powered APC Federal Government, which has so far been able to manage the gains of its two-time electoral successes, in terms of very concrete, cogent and verifiable democratic score-card, cannot afford to be bugged down by certain issues that are not in consonance with normative behavioral-compliance by either elected representatives or appointees of the Federal Government”, he noted.
The Executive Director urged the President to maintain his position on the forensic audit and call the National Assembly to order so as not to further escalate the divisive politics by the members of his government.
“The era of treating very crucial matters of urgent public importance with projected pathological bias just to tarnish the image of political leadership figures are over,” he emphasized.
Galadanchi who lamented that the trending crisis is fast assuming the dimension of undefined interests and highly unstructured emotive appeals, said the conflict of seemingly designed positions and interests by vested interests, if not checked, may usher in some negatively re-enforcing behavior-discrepancies that will be detrimental to the nation’s overall political image, both locally and internationally.
“It will also affect the overall political visibility that the ruling All Progressives Congress party may have enjoyed over the last five years of being in the saddle of political development administration of the Nigerian state”, he maintained.
