Senate Leader, Victor Ndoma-Egba (SAN), is the representative of the Cross River Central Senatorial District in the National Assembly. Recently, he conducted journalists on a tour of the constituency projects he has attracted to his constituency and the southern and northern senatorial districts of the state. In this interview with correspondent Bassey Inyang, he speaks on some of his constituency projects and his plans towards providing more socio-economic infrastructure for the people. Excerpts
Can you give us a general overview of your constituency projects that we have seen in the last couple of days?
Victor Ndoma-Egba
Let me start by thanking you the media for spending these number of days with me, touring my constituency and seeing my projects in the constituency and beyond. I believe that the projects has been as revealing to you as it has been to me because even for me who was facilitating the projects, they have now assumed a new meaning when you see them physically, than when you see them on paper.
On paper, I didn’t appreciate the import of those projects. But now that I have seen them, I think they have assumed a new meaning for me. The projects can be categorised. There are those that are infrastructure related; road projects, there are those related to the environment, and then of course you have the social projects, education and health. What we didn’t see on this trip were my interventions in rural electrification; we have quite a number of those. But because of time constraint, we were not able to look at the rural electrification projects. Those are the categories of projects we saw essentially.
And I will like to say that while quite a number of them are going on, well, quite a few; I am totally dissatisfied with, especially the health facility at Yala Nkum and the Ikom-Etomi–Agokim water falls road and the school building in Ogep- Osokom. These ones were dismal. The rest have done as well as the level of funding would permit.
Having gone round, we have seen that education has enjoyed a substantial number of your constituency projects; why is this so?
Education is easily the story of my life. I have told the story a number of times before. When I was to enter secondary school, we had to raise three pounds; that was during the civil war. My father was caught-up in Biafra, my mother had been out of work for some time, and we were depending on my late uncle who, later on, became a paramount ruler and chairman of the Cross River State Traditional Rulers Council, to raise three pounds for me to enter secondary school. He did everything in his powers to raise the money, but he couldn’t.
What did you do?
Thence came the option that I defer going to secondary school for another year. At that point of giving up, as we were trekking back to Akparabong from Ikom I was crying all the way as I trekked with my mother somewhere in Ikom, we ran into Paul Erokoro (Snr). That is the father of Paul Erokoro the Senior Advocate who hadn’t seen us for a while. When he saw me, he was very excited and asked what I was doing, and I said I had been grated admission into Mary Knorol College. He just put his hands in his back pocket and came out with the three pounds. Since then, I have wondered what would have happened to me, if the benevolent Paul Erokoro (Snr.) had not come to my aid at the time.
So, sometimes, it is not the amount of money, sometimes it is when a small amount of money is needed. For me, that money came at the nick of time and made a total difference in my life; and here I am today. So, what I try to do is to make sure that to the best of my ability, I also try to intervene to that level of three pounds in the lives of those who need it.
Tell us about your scholarship programme?
I am very proud of my scholarship programme. Today, we have over 500 beneficiaries at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I think it is costing me about N60 to N70 million now to fund, you know. But I am happy that, at least, we are able to intervene directly at people’s point of need.
It was noticed that at each point you stopped to inspect a project, the crowd that gathered were very ecstatic in receiving you, which contrasts with what we have been hearing in the past. What are you going to do to sustain this kind of enthusiasm for you?
The whole essence of this tour, apart from assessing the projects, is also to learn. And one of the lessons that have been taken away is to show greater interest in the progress of the projects. But, I will like to give you a better background why there appears to be a little disconnection. They are essentially constituency projects and in the days of President (Olusegun) Obasanjo, clear instructions were given that contractors should have nothing to do with the representatives of the areas where sited. I don’t even know most of the contractors; when they start the project you do not know. You attract the projects, but they were under strict instructions to have little or no dealings with us as representatives. So, we were not even in the picture, we didn’t make any input as to the awards. And I will give you an example. I have my suspicion why the project in Yala Nkum is that bad. These projects are capped. They have an upper limit. Now, for you to get the maximum benefits of those projects, you need to look for local contractors to do them; people who have a stake in that project.
But imagine that for a project of that nature, maybe the contractor is from Sokoto, Kebbi or Lagos, even from Ibadan. You definitely will not get the best out of it because even the cost of him travelling from his location to the project site is eating into the cost of the project. So, there must be a review of the methods for awarding these contracts and it is one of the lessons I am going to take back.
Some of the projects you mentioned, like the one in Nkum and Osokum, do you intend to raise a team to supervise the project from time to time since you cannot do it alone?
Yes, I agree with you, henceforth we will have our own local team to be going round and send periodic reports to us.
Apart from two or three projects that the contractors did not voice out, paucity of funds is a challenge majority of the contractors complained about. They note that this short supply of funds stall completion of the projects on schedule. Can do you intend to address this problem?
That is the general challenge for projects execution in Nigeria. It is a general challenge because you have an amount in the budget for a given project. You discover the releases don’t come as at when due. There are constraints within the system. And it is not typical of my constituency projects it is common to all the projects in the country. So, I think that another lesson from this tour is that we must develop new ideas outside the box to assist government in properly funding projects, so that projects don’t start and stop.
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