Business Post Contributor
By Jerome-Mario Chijioke Utomi
The recent naming of Barrister Chiedu Ebie as the board Chairman of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) by Bola Ahmed Tinubu, President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has again shown clearly that ordinary calculation can be upturned by extra-ordinary personalities.
With the appointment, the ancient argument of whether circumstance or personality shapes events is settled in favour of the latter.
Expectedly, torrents of accolades from Nigerians of goodwill and admirers have flooded both the conventional and online news platforms with more expected for this unique achievement.
While many described your appointment as befitting, others believe that under your watch, NDDC will achieve its core objective of attracting a democratized infrastructural development of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. To the rest, your records of performance in the past public offices held have not only made your appointment eminently desirable but qualify you as the best man for the job.
Of course, their testament may not be wrong, looking at your indelible record as former Commissioner for Post Primary Education and Secretary to the Delta State Government (SSG),
However, I must confess that since that announcement, despite my familiarity with social responsibility postulations-which teach that every freedom must go with a responsibility, each time I remember this feat, fears that leave me lost in the maze of high voltage confusion come flooding.
The reasons for this ‘confusion’ stem from two similar but separate sources. While the first flows from the general and glaring awareness that NDDC, an innocent/well-intentioned federal government agency established by Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in the year 2000 with the sole mandate of developing the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria, have, contrary to expectation, become an establishment where fierce political and ideological warfare in ways that negate our rationality as human beings are held, where a great amount of innocent human character has been spilled, wars of words waged, countless souls/ambition persecuted and martyred and where noble ideas and idles are never communicated.
Also disturbing is the awareness that NDDC’s existence has been characterized/trailed by challenges that range from protracted inability to deliver legacy projects (infrastructures) to the people of the region in the past 23years of its existence to being satirically referred to by many commentators as an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) for the settlement/compensation of failed politicians within and outside the region.
From the aforementioned deep sense of crisis, it is obvious that the commission, which was designed to play a key role in attracting development, building infrastructure, providing well-planned fiscal incentives and, most importantly, establishing good relationships with oil and gas-producing communities while creating sound policies that will fundamentally enable private enterprises to operate successfully in the area, has woefully and roundly failed the people of the region.
This particular fact is further evident in the pace of underdevelopment and poverty of infrastructure that currently gazes at the people of the region on their faces.
In view of these spiralling facts, there exists one important truth that must not be hidden from you: the NDDC they inherited enjoys more burden than goodwill.
To change the present narrative, you must first recognize that the luxury of a leisurely approach to societal challenge is no longer permissible in the modern-day leadership arena. Your predecessors failed to engineer prosperity simply because they chose to do good instead of doing well. To better understand this position, ‘doing-good entails charity service or so-called selfless service where one renders assistance and walks away without waiting for any returns. On the other hand, doing well describes reciprocation and ‘win-win’ because the doer is also a stakeholder and has an intention to benefit at least in goodwill and friendship’.
To succeed, it is important to recognize that bringing a radical improvement or achieving sustainable development will not be possible if you present yourself as all-knowing, more generous, more nationalistic, more selfless, more honest or kind, more intelligent, good-looking or well-briefed than other stakeholders.
As an incentive, you need to take these steps: first, you should guard against the euphoria inspired by the present appointments; make no grandiose plans or claims while your thinking is altered by feelings inspired by triumph; and secondly, the corrupting tendency of the additional power you have won. Try not to feel that much less accountability because you have that much power. You still must answer to yourself, and you must more than ever lead.
Another point you must not fail to remember is that your enemies are everywhere and have, with this appointment, increased in number, locations and forms. “You must love your neighbours but keep your neighbourhood’, view corruption as something/act that destroys and breaks that trust, which is absolutely essential for the delicate alchemy at the heart of representative democracy.
While there are presently conflicting and varying degrees of challenges confronting the people of the region and calls for urgent attention, this piece holds the opinion that, as you resume, creatively generating breakthrough leadership ideas that will see to the ‘eruption’ of legacy projects in the region should be the best way to start. This is important as the region and the nation, by extension, is faced with a bleak future if this is not achieved.
In making this call, it is obvious that there is nothing more ‘difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating such changes as the innovator will make more enemies of all those who prospered under old order’. But any leader who does come out powerful, secure, respected and happy.
Thus, two things stand out as a flood of congratulatory messages continues to flow into your home. The moment portrays you as lucky. But like every success which comes with new challenges, the appointment has thrust yet another responsibility on you- an extremely important destiny; to complete a process of socioeconomic rejuvenation of the Niger Delta youths, which we have spent far too long a time to do.
Also very key, you must study history, study the actions of your predecessors, to see how they conducted themselves and to discover the reasons for their victories or their defeats so that you can avoid the latter and imitate the former. If you are able to correct the above challenge, it will be your most powerful accomplishment for earning new respect and emulation.. And if you are not, it will equally go down the anal of history.
Finally, even as this piece joins Nigerians of goodwill to congratulate you on this feat achieved, it must, on the other hand, remind you that this is an opportunity you must not miss!
Jerome-Mario Utomi is the Programme Coordinator (Media and Public Policy) at Social and Economic Justice Advocacy (SEJA), Lagos. He can be reached via [email protected]/08032725374
