Professor Lucky Akaruese from the University of Port Harcourt has commended the Federal Government for ordering forensic auditing and setting up an Interim Management Committee at the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC).

The university Don in a statement yesterday in Koko, the headquarters of the Warri North Local Government Council Area while addressing an Itsekiri youths group, the Benin River Youths Forum noted that ” the region cannot be said to have adequately benefitted from the interventionist commission as a result of the maladministration and purposelessness that has characterized the Commission since inception.

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Akaruese urged the Youths to show serious concern over the recent happenings in the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and should not allow themselves to be misguided and used, and thus constituting themselves as cog in the wheel of progress over the present efforts to reverse the fortune of the Commission for the general good of the region and its denizens.

“Today, the region is unfortunately littered with abandoned projects, including some completed ones like ‘solar lighting’ which are not maintained and thus not functioning even within few months of completion, even when such projects cannot be said to be strategic enough.

“The slow pace of work on the construction of Ogheye-Koko road which was awarded in November 2009 is a clear example of how the commission operates, for over ten years the constructing firm has not achieved up to eight kilometers of completed work even when the contract paper stated that the whole project should have been completed within thirty-six months”.

He urged the group to support the present Interim Management Committee set up to oversee the activities of the Commission and the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs to enable them to clean up the Commission and reposition it for its core mandate of facilitating the infrastructural development of the oil and gas-bearing and producing areas.

while condemning the activities of some groups and individuals who have made themselves available tools in the hand of those that have ruined the Commission by engaging in frivolous protests and petitions against the efforts of the present Interim Management Committee and the Federal Government.

In his remark, the leader of the Benin River Youths Forum Mr. Gbogwa Nanna said the sordid situation of the area, particularly that the Ogheye-Koko road project should have opened the area has now been consigned to the status of abandonment.