NDDC sets up 2024 budget panel

The Niger Delta Development Commission has inaugurated a 16-member budget committee to prepare its 2024 budget through engagements with stakeholders.

Addressing members of the committee during the inauguration ceremony at the NDDC headquarters in Port Harcourt, the NDDC Managing Director, Dr. Samuel Ogbuku, said that the committee must first identify the vision of the NDDC as an interventionist agency in order to prioritise the allocation of available resources.

A statement quoted him as saying, “As a committee, the first thing you must do is to come up with and articulate what our vision for 2024 is. It is our vision that will determine our budget. Let’s look at a budget that can be implemented; a budget that will capture our present reality; a legacy budget.

“Our vision must be clear so, that in implementing our budget, we will be properly guided. To achieve this, we must have a stakeholder’s conference to get their buy-in. We are not doing it for ourselves, but for the collective benefit of stakeholders of the Niger Delta region.

“It is our vision that we are going to propagate and sell to stakeholders for easier buy-in. If we don’t have this stakeholders’ conference for us to have a common vision, whatever we present is going to be distorted at the end of the day.”

The NDDC boss said that the 2024 NDDC budget should strike a balance in funding new projects, on-going projects, as well as debt financing in order to get the buy-in of stakeholders.

The committee, he said must actively engage stakeholders in their activities.

He stressed that the budget should be properly captioned to highlight the underpinning philosophy behind it, stating, “We must capture our present reality of indebtedness, while making provisions for the implementation of the projects in our vision.”

He said further, “We must look at the size of our budget. It must be realistic and implementable, and should capture our debt profile with provision for debt servicing. However, it must strike a balance, such that the huge debt burden does not distort our budget.”

The Secretary of the Committee and the NDDC Acting Director of Planning, Mr. Davies Okarevu, explained that the state offices of the commission would be fully involved in the budget process, noting that efforts would be made to ensure that the commission produced an all-inclusive budget.