OPEN LETTER TO THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL OF THE FEDERATION

NIGER DELTA JUSTICE FORUM

No. 86 Nwaniba Road, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State.

Telephone: +24 912 460 8050

OPEN LETTER TO THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL OF THE FEDERATION

September 7, 2021

The Hon. Attorney-General and Min. of Justice

Mr. Abubakar Malami

Federal Ministry of Justice, Abuja.

Sir,

RE: NDDC FORENSIC AUDIT REPORT: MATTERS ARISING.

We write with reference to the mendacious and dissembling report submitted to you and disingenuously labelled ‘’forensic audit report on NDDC 2001-2019’’ by the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs.

We decided to write this open letter to you because apart from being the Chief Law Officer of the Federation, you are a man with an incisive, deeply analytical legal mind and the so called report was submitted to you.

A cursory look at recent national news headlines betrays the malevolent intention of those who orchestrated the audit report. The mechanics employed by the planners was awful, the tactics deployed by the executors was dreadful and the metrics and barometer of the work of the forensic auditors were abysmal. They deliberately mismanaged the entire process and concocted a scheme to mislead you in order to achieve a predetermined outcome.

The exact amount of funding received by NDDC from 2001 to 2019 is a matter of public information and available in the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation and that of NEITI. If this basic but fundamental element of the forensic audit report can be intentionally misrepresented to create a baseless sensation, then the report leaves much to be desired.

For the avoidance of doubt, NDDC has received the following sums of money from 2001 to 2019:

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CONTRIBUTIONS:   N760,165,606,560.32

GOVT (OMPADEC ELECTRICITY FUND):          N2,500,000,000.00

STATE GOVERNMENT GRANTS:                       N18,175,000.00

OIL COMPANIES CONTRIBUTIONS:                 N1,623,690,225,765.07

OTHER INCOME:                                                 N19,566,957,137.81

TOTAL RECEIPTS:                                                N2, 405,940,964,463.20

(See link for attached PDF NDDC REVENUES )

Sir, the puzzling question that should agitate your mind is what mathematical abracadabra did the Minister and auditors employ to arrive at the N6 trillion figure which they presented to you when it is clear from the above table that NDDC received only N2.4 trillion between 2001 -2019 (a period of eighteen years)? Does it mean that the auditors don’t know the difference between income and approved budget or were they instructed to engage in deliberate misrepresentation? This misinformation is not only misleading, wicked and unconscionable but also inimical to future growth of the Niger Delta region. It is capable of inciting other regions against the Niger Delta now already being perceived as having frittered away a whopping sum of N6 trillion. To this end, we implore you, sir, to verify these figures and urgently correct this callous falsehood.

A forensic audit as a matter of practice must scale certain matrixes including planning, collecting evidence, writing a report with additional step of a potential court appearance to concur or disprove the fraud committed. Are the independent and dependent variable concepts/framework adopted by the auditors in the report submitted to you testable? Were the records they used appropriate to the problems or gaps they tried to fill? What type of data collection methods were used? Was there any rationale for the non-usage of technical tools and non-analysis of bills of engineering measurements to evaluate the extent of work done on projects? Was their observational guide sufficient to justify their reports? Were the contractors interviewed, who were the interviewers and how were they trained to minimize bias?

With due respect sir, the truth is that there was no forensic audit in the true sense of it. The report you have is the end product of a shambolic and scrappy exercise cleverly devised to deflate and buy time to continue to maintain absolute control over the finances of NDDC. It was pre-arranged to indict pre-determined targets.

The President ordered the forensic audit in October 2019 but the audit proper in the states started less than six months ago. It is noteworthy that about 40% of NDDC projects are located in riverine areas which the auditors could not access with gunboats because of low tide especially in Bayelsa, Rivers and Delta States. You may wish to independently verify this assertion. Some of the auditors complained aloud of censorship and lack of access to vital documents. The field auditors would spend less than 10 minutes at a 2 klms. shoreline protection project, 2 sq klm dredging site or a canalization project and use their observational guide to make a determination without the aid of technical tools such as total station, theodolite, fathometer or any form of sounding equipment. They would go to a 20klm road project completed more than 10 years ago in a challenging terrain, drive on less than 1klm distance of the road and without extracting the core for testing write a report as instructed by the orchestra conductor.

The auditors did not bother with funding issues, design issues, community and terrain challenges, legal disputes etc. They never interviewed a single contractor neither did they bother to relate with the engineers and consultants who supervised the projects. It is common knowledge that the auditors didn’t visit up to 30% of the advertised 13,777 abandoned projects they wrote reports on because of the constraint of time and terrain difficulties. How then can this report withstand the slightest legal scrutiny?

NDDC has had its audited report submitted to the Auditor-General of the Federation, the National Assembly, NEITI, The NDDC Presidential Reports and other regulatory agencies. It is unprofessional for the auditors not to have liaised with any of these agencies for independent confirmation of information.

The audit report is littered with intentional acts of muddling to control, scare, scandalize or bring to public opprobrium certain persons who have been targeted for embarrassment. This clearly explains the pre-audit allegations of a certain person who was receiving N1bn monthly as consultancy fees to collect debts from IOCs and another one who was accused of abandoning a $70m project which up till today have not been substantiated despite several challenges to prove same.

The recommendation of the report that board membership of the commission should be on part time basis in order to reduce costs should be ignored because it demonstrates clearly that the auditors did not even bother to read the Act setting up the Commission and they conveniently refused to question the thousands of people that management has surreptitiously employed in the last two years without recourse to due process.

While we recognize the need to diligently audit the finances of NDDC especially in the last two years and tackle the malfeasance that has bedeviled it and establish a credible template for efficient service delivery, it is our contention that the purported ‘’forensic audit report’’ submitted to you is not worth the Ghana-must-go bags in which they were delivered as the report cannot stand any basic accounting or legal challenge. The report should either be referred to the Auditor-General of the Federation for a review or be sent back to the Minister for his continuous entertainment.

Sir, please do not lend the weight of your office to the antics of desperate plutocrats who want to keep on embarrassing the government.

Thank you.

Bassey Ime Idongesit

Conve Iner.