Rt Hon Orok Otu Duke, the State’s NDDC Representative.
Chief Okoi Obono-Obla, former Presidential aide to former President Mohammadu Buhari, has raised the alarm over the “missing” N100 million Christmas package given to youths and women of Cross River state by the Niger Delta Development Commission (NNDC).
In a statement on Sunday in Calabar, Obono-Obla said, for the first time since 2000, through the instrumentality of Rt Hon Orok Otu Duke, the State’s NDDC Representative, “the NDDC, has graciously given the sum of N100 million as Christmas palliative to the youths and women of Cross River State”.
However, Obono-Obla is worried that the money is “missing” as he queried, “who is keeping the palliative of N100 million given to the women and young people of Cross River State by NDDC?
“We can only have One Representative for Cross River State remember”.
He stated that Duke has demonstrated true leadership by “exerting pressure on the powers that be in the NDDC to stop treating Cross River State as a nobody but as an equal partner and stakeholders in the NDDC which should enjoy all the rights and privileges acruing to other partners in the Niger Delta region.
“This is an acknowledgement of the principle of equality inherent in the enacting statute, creating NDDC, but which successive administrations in NDDC have mischievously misinterpreted and institutionalized a regime of targeted discrimination against Cross River State in the Politics of who get what when and how in NDDC”.
Making reference to Proverbs 29: 2 of the Holy Bible, Obono-Obla said, King Solomon, wrote to his son as a future king of Israel in an apt observation and rule about the political policy when good people of any nation assume the mantle of leadership, the people would rejoice.
“I have to commend Otuekong Orok Otu Duke for his dogged and no nonsense leadership, which he handled and handled his office as the representative of Cross River State in the NDDC since his assumption of office in November 2023”, he said.
He thumbed up the new leadership of the NNDC in the state under Duke for reintroducing equity, fairness and equality in the system.
