Niger Delta elites are under developing region – Yakmut

A retired Director of the Federal Civil Service, Alhaji Alhassan Yakmut, who served in various ministries, including Niger Delta Affairs and was also Director-General of National Sports Commission, speaks with BEN OGBEMUDIA on the problems confronting the Niger Delta region, and other sundry issues

Now that you are out of service, how has retirement life been?

Retirement life is very interesting. Some of us saw it coming the day we were employed. I started preparing after my employment and served for 31 years, I have been planning for retirement for 29 years so it didn’t come to me as a surprise. As a believer, I know everything that has a beginning has an end, along the line I saw it more as a transition from one stage of life to another rather than retirement. So I only drop the title of a public servant and I am now a private servant.

You were known more as a sports administration than as a civil servant, can you compare the two lives, being in the sporting sector and later in the environment sector?

I will just compare from the perspective of how the two work but the experiences are different and it’s longer in the sports aspect than in the other sector. I did 25 years of sports administration and 14 years of active play so that’s 39 years put together for sports excluding my playing career in primary to university then along the line, having reached the peak of sports administration as Director-general, I moved to the Ministry of Niger-Delta, first one year as Director-General coordinating activities in the office of the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Niger-Delta.

Along the line, I served as the Secretary to the technical audit committee that looked at all the projects in the Ministry of Niger Delta that were awarded from 2009 to 2015, but it also allowed me to cover the entire Niger Delta. I was in the Niger-Delta by road, by air, and by sea, I went up to Burutu which is about seven hours from Warri by boat, then went to the Ogbe-Ijaw and all these places we went round and accessed and our report was the one that made for that period of the first term of President Muhammadu Buhari, it was approved, the NDDC was now brought under the Ministry because they had so many duplications of jobs and uncompleted projects but now it has been stream-lined, the master plan is being followed.

And after two and a half years in the Niger Delta, I was posted to the Ministry of Interior and my duty was the coordination of appointment and discipline in the four parastatals that I handled under the Ministry of Interior namely the civil defence, immigration, correctional service, and fire service.

That also gave me the opportunity for another type of administration to be applied but be that as it may, you will be wondering why I never had any difficulty moving from one place to the other, it is because all along, even when I was employed with masters in sports administration in 1989, I had gone ahead to do other courses in administration, management, corporate strategy.

In the course of my job in the public service, I applied for a post-graduate diploma in Administration and Public Relations from the University of c and also a master’s in Business Administration and did a Masters in Law and Diplomacy at the University of Jos. These are courses that gave me the advantage and smooth transition from one level to the other no matter the kind of operations I am given to conduct, particularly at the level of management and administration, it is all about the application of knowledge to adapt to the objective of that institution so why I acquired a lot of stamina, energy, and resilience from sports, I was also able to apply my academic knowledge in other places that I served.

Today, I am in the private sector, I own two companies- one is a construction company, the other is a consultancy and I also run an integrated commercial farm.

People are insinuating that the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs has cornered all the activities in the Niger Delta Development Commission, are you of that view?

Let me tell you, in most of the places I worked, it was the same Niger-Delta that I expected where 75 per cent of the internal revenue of the country is generated and I saw a four-year-old boy defecating by the side of the streets and I also saw at the waterside where the masses live and I saw young children paddling canoes while the elites were taking flying boats.

In the same place where the oil is found, you also have there for the past eleven years when we visited, they said light never blinked but there was always light 24 hours in the same place where I saw the public primary school and public secondary school students still received lectures under the trees till I left. So, in a situation where out of 421 projects that were awarded between 2009 and 2015, amounting to about N745 billion, only 12 per cent was executed.

The Niger Delta to me is a mirage about life where the golden eggs are and then poverty is also there. I also discovered that the problem is not even much of government, it is the elite in the region. I remember going to a community to check a project and the people were saying they don’t like their leaders, all their leaders’ children are studying overseas.

I didn’t see any functional medical centre, I didn’t see any comfortable learning environment done by the state government, all the projects that were attempted was by the Federal Government and even those were not good but now our committee recommended that the NDDC should be a subsidiary of the Ministry of Niger-Delta Affairs, that is the convention everywhere you go, there are very few agencies supervised by the presidency because there are no ministries to oversee NDDC that is why it was under the presidency and each time they tell you the presidency, the presidency is huge, there won’t be time for concentration to details and also to supervise, monitor and evaluate consistently at the presidency, so we recommended that the NDDC should be a parastatal under the ministry of Niger-Delta Affairs with strict adherence to the implementation of the master plan. When I was posted there, I stumbled on a 222-page document written by the United Nations on the development of the Niger Delta and I read it page by page before I assumed as Director of Special Procedure.

When I was later moved to the department of planning, research, and statistics of the Ministry of Niger-Delta Affairs, that document also assisted me in adjusting on how to achieve development and ease livelihood in the Niger-Delta as well as control environmental hazards but unfortunately, when you are in service and there is duty call somewhere, you have to go but we were able to initiate that.

So, the current minister of the Ministry of Niger-Delta Affairs should not be seen as somebody who has cornered something, no, you see the idea of a forensic audit is not only about pointing at people who embezzled money, it is also to ascertain where there was strict and deliberate effort to address developmental issues and whether they are being done equitably because Niger-Delta is about nine states.

Why is it that there are still issues of environmental pollution, poor health care and why is it that infrastructure for facilities and utilities are not available and why is it that the common man does not have access to good health and education in Niger-Delta?

That’s why the forensic update wants to bring out strategies on how to have a consistent development program for the Niger Delta.

You carried out some audits on the project of the Niger Delta, both the NDDC and the ministry, were you shocked at the level of people who were involved in those projects? Can you just mention one or two names?

You know what? Projects are not done by people, projects are executed by companies so we submitted the report, we made three recommendations majorly one was that the NDDC should be a subsidiary of the Ministry and two, we said contractors who have been paid should go back to the site and then thirdly, we said that contractors who have been paid and did not execute the job should be brought to book either through any of the agencies, either ICPC or EFCC and I remember that the list of the categories of the contractors was kept and they were treated accordingly, there was a mass return to site before we left the ministry and there were also some names that were submitted but all I did was that 62 percent of funding was made for the projects that were awarded but the execution was 12 percent but I am sure the situation has improved now because the findings of that committee assisted in bringing back our contractors to site.

Ahead 2023, what part of the divide do you think the PDP, APC, should zone their presidential ticket?

Interestingly, the zoning system has political and ecological factors which will determine the terms and principles in the constitution of the party. Now, the two parties adopted shifting of power from North to South. The last leadership of PDP was from the South and then in the eight years, it will be very difficult to be fair and just if you keep the principle of North and South without understanding how the pendulum of presidential leadership moved.

The pendulum swings according to tenure, so are we saying in the tenure the APC had is no longer north that we are taking it back to PDP? PDP is now asking for a Northern representation which I think is one North, two political parties and one South, two political parties, For the APC in the North, there is no argument as to the power moving to the South but PDP is trying to redesign its own, I can’t speak for PDP, I told you I am keeping to the tenets of our agreement that power must go to the South.

You are from Plateau State where there are lots of issues ranging from security challenges and most times, the leaders are blamed for not doing enough to ensure peace in the state. What do you think the government should do to restore peace in the once tourist destination?

Whatever instrument you are using to measure the level of peace and the stability of the Plateau weather thermometer, barometer, or projector, it must give you the same result that the level of peace in Plateau now is over and above what it used to be.

The pocket of crisis you are seeing now is not reminiscent of Plateau alone, it is all over the country. So, Plateau is no longer a constituent, we have attained over 70 per cent of peace and stability in Plateau as against what it was before and I must give credit to the current governor who has adopted as a key item of his government or administration, peace, and stability, he has brought some level of tolerance.

I remember in his first term when we met, I told him that one of the major reasons for the crisis in Plateau is holding on to power without giving some aspect of it to other segments of the state, for instance, there are about 52 nationalities in Plateau state that are indigenous.

I told you, Moses struck stone for water when he was taking the Israelites out of Egypt and 12 fountains emerged and the fountains were not allocated according to population. They sent each tribe to a fountain regardless of the population of the tribe, even if one tribe had three people, they are entitled to one fountain because there are 12 tribes.

Now you have 52 tribes, ensure that there is equity and leverage on all these nationalities and it was applauded and he has reflected this. The plateau was very hot then in terms of crisis, the crisis of Plateau was more or less war but now we are getting only pockets of the crisis of either banditry or kidnap.

Then, it was a full village war that Plateau was under for months but it is not the case now. I want to suggest that the current situation should be appreciated and encouraged and sooner or later, Plateau will return to its place as a home of peace and tourism