Human rights group, Ogoni Development Drive, ODD, has issued a 14-day ultimatum to contractors handling various jobs in the hydrocarbon pollution and remediation programme, hyprep, to urgently mobilise to site or be dragged before the anti-graft agencies for fraud.
The group noted that seven years of the kick-off of the Ogoni clean up exercise, which at its inception, appeared to be a source of hope to the ordinary Ogoni, it suddenly went into hibernation soon after take-off.
Speaking in Bori, Khana Local Government Area of Rivers State, Chief Solomon Ndigbara, Chief Security Officer of Ogoni; Solomon Lenu, Convener, Ogoni Development Drive, ODD; Chief TeeJude Siraa, PRO, and Celestine Nkiri, Secretary, said immediate past Minister of Environment, Adullahi Hassan, and the former project coordinator of HYPREP, Prof. Ferdinand Gyadom gave out countless number of contracts to their “cronies worth billions of naira, with a title tagged shoreline protection.
“It is, however, disheartening, that, one year and few months after these all important contracts were awarded to some quasi contractors, and mobilisation of not less than 30 percent of the contract sum paid by the immediate past administrators of HYPREP, not one of these briefcase contractors had mobilised to site for the take off of the project.”
The group said it was giving the affected contractors for the “Shoreline protection job 14 days ultimatum from the date of this briefing, to fully mobilise to site. Otherwise, we shall champion the process for the revocation of their contracts, and they shall stand the risk of refunding every penny received from the agency. “After day 14 and no show, we shall officially write to the EFCC and other financial graft agencies to institute a probe against the contractors, former Minister of Environment, whose friends are said to have gotten a large chunk of these contracts, and the former PC too, to answer to a grand mismanagement of all times from HYPREP.”
Credit: Vanguard
