Date Published: 08/25/11

DESOPADEC gets New Management Board

The Delta state government has appointed a new Management Board for the Delta State Oil Producing Areas Development Commission (DESOPADEC). The members of new Board, were screened and cleared by the Rt. Hon. Victor Ochei led Delta State House of Assembly on August 11, 2011, after they had been nominated by Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan to House. The composition of the new Board is as follows:

Oritsua Kpogho – Chairman

Henry Offa –Member

Joseph Ogeh – Member

Michael Diden (Ejele) – Member

Johnson Boro – Member

Rev.Chukwudi Eke – Member

Barr. Benedicta Osakunih – Member

Kingsley Otuaro – Member

Dr. Peter Egedegbe – Member.

The new Board takes over from the Care taker Committee headed by Mr. Reginald Bayoko, which was appointed by Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan to take over the affairs of the Commission when the tenure of the former Board led by Chief Wellington Okirika expired in July 2010.

A Secretary is expected to be appointed for the Board by the State government as soon as possible. The new Secretary, according to the amended constitution of the Commission, is expected to be sourced from the Delta state civil service and will be a through-bred bureaucrat whose status will not be less than the position of a Director in the Civil service.

The composition of the new Board is bound to raise some eyebrows and several controversies.

For example the new Chairman of the Board, Mr. Oritsua Kpogho who was the former Head of Finance in the Commission, is from the Itsekiri Ethnic Nationality, the same place as Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan and many Delta watchers are bound to seek clarification on why an Itsekiri should be made Chairman of DESOPADEC which is entitled by law to 50% of the 13% derivation allocation from the Federal Government.

However, DESOPADEC insiders claim that the new Chairman, Oritsua Kpogho, who is a distinguished intellectual with a sterling track record of service with one of the finest internationally renowned Finance Houses, did not make many friends while he was Head of Finance of the Commission because of his strict and disciplined financial regimen, which often frustrated some of the big wigs in the Commission.

He was also seen as a mole for Governor Uduaghan in the Commission and a very effective channel, especially in the disbursement and appropriation of the 50% revenue from the 13% derivation allocation from the Federal Government accruing to DESOPADEC by law.

Four other appointments will however be greeted with applause and celebration by the people from the ethnic nationalities they have been appointed to represent in the Commission.

The first is that of Michael Diden, popularly called Ejele, a former Council Chairman and who is indeed well loved and had been widely touted to become the Chairman of the new Board. The fact that he has accepted to become a Commissioner representing the Itsekiri ethnic nationality in the Commission may be an indication of the high level brinkmanship which Governor Uduaghan may have employed to get him to get the highly popular Ejele to reconsider his earlier position.

The other is Kingsley Otuaro, a young Ijaw leader who has been the Chairman of the Delta Waterways Security Committee and was seen as being very instrumental in ensuring the overwhelming victory of Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan in the Ijaw riverine communities in the April 2011 governorship elections.Kingsley Otuaro (whose brother is the popular Denis Otuaro) is also seen as one of the popular new voices set to take over from the likes of George Timinimi, who was very visible and vocal in the opposition against Governor Uduaghan in the April 2011 elections.

Henry Offa will also be another popular appointment to the Board of DESOPADEC as one of the Commissioners representing the Urhobo ethnic nationality. A key player in Delta politics, he hails from the famous Oghara and is a dyed-in-the-wool James Ibori loyalist. He is a well known philanthropist in his area and is said to have contributed immensely to saving the face Governor Uduaghan in Delta central in the April 2011 elections.

Joseph Ogeh is also seen as another very popular appointment. An Architect, who is representing the Isoko Ethnic nationality, he had also been largely touted as one of those who would be considered for the position of the Chairman of the new Board, but the emergence of Comrade Ovuozuorie Macaulay as the Delta state Secretary to the State Government, SSG, coupled with the obvious intention of Governor Uduaghan to give the chairmanship of the Interventionist Agency to an Itsekiri man, may have informed the decision to make him member of the Board instead. Architect Ogeh, who is generally regarded and well liked by the Isoko nation and is well known for his philanthropy and accommodation. He was also very central to the victory of Governor Uduaghan in Isokoland in the April 2011 elections, after the humiliation suffered by the governor in that area in the January 6, 2011 re-run elections.

It will be recalled that the Constitution of DESOPADEC was amended in July 2010, following widespread speculations that there was a sinister plot to extend the tenure of the old Board led by Chief Okirika by a couple of years to accommodate the 2011 general elections and the emergence of a new administration.

Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan had then moved, in the wake of the dangerously divisive acrimony that attended the end of the Okirika tenure, to set up a care taker committee, led by Reginald Bayoko, a Permanent Secretary in the Delta State Ministry of Finance and an alleged Uduaghan loyalist.

This move had relatively quietened the restive temper of the Oil Producing Communities as they waited for the 2011 general elections and the aftermath, to see who would emerge as members of the substantive Board.

Governor Uduaghan had left no one in doubt of his very huge disappointment with the Chief Wellington Okirika and Andi Osawota led DESOPADEC Board, which had been seen as the very cesspool of massive corruption, administrative ineptitude and extravagant financial recklessness.

With the appointment of a new Board headed by a sound financial technocrat in the person of Oritsua Kpogho and an expected administrative guru coming from the civil service as Secretary, many Deltans and Delta watchers will be expecting that the discontent which is bound to arise from the decision to appoint an Itsekiri man as Commission chairman, will only be addressed by the re-positioning of DESOPADEC to deliver on the mandate of rehabilitating, rejuvenating and resuscitating the oil producing communities of Delta state and ensuring accelerated development for the area, which had informed the setting up of the intervention agency in the first place.

The new Board is expected to be sworn-in before the end of August 2011.

Courtesy FlashpointNews