NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects
The Niger Delta Development Commission has urged residents of host communities to take ownership of development projects in their areas and protect them from vandalism, theft and neglect, arguing that the destruction of public assets ultimately punishes the same people they were meant to benefit. The appeal was made in Benin, Edo State, during a one-day workshop themed Capacity Building Programme for Stakeholders Across the Niger Delta Region on Community Ownership and Protection of NDDC Projects.
That is the basic fact behind the headline, NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects. But the deeper issue is not simply that the Commission wants communities to “protect government property.” What the NDDC is really saying is that public infrastructure in the Niger Delta will keep failing if the people who live beside it continue to see it as distant government property rather than as local assets tied directly to their own welfare. In the Benin workshop, Edo State Office Director Mercy Babawale said many residents wrongly assume they have no responsibility toward projects because they were funded by government, and she argued that this mindset must change.
Babawale’s remarks were unusually direct. She said communities must not allow vandals to destroy what has been provided for them, warning that when people fail to protect such projects, they are the ones who lose. Her point was simple and hard to ignore. A damaged road, looted solar streetlight, broken water facility or abandoned public building does not hurt Abuja or the NDDC headquarters first. It hurts the community that was meant to use it every day. That is why NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects is not just a slogan. It is a statement about survival, utility and local responsibility.
The Commission also tied this message to accountability. Babawale said the NDDC does not execute projects without first assessing local needs, and she urged residents to be involved in development work from the beginning, ask questions where they suspect foul play, and report contractors who appear to be compromising standards. That is an important detail because it shifts the community’s role from passive observer to active stakeholder. The Commission is not merely asking people to guard completed projects. It is also asking them to pay attention while those projects are being conceived and built,NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects.
That broader point has been echoed across the region in recent weeks. In Rivers State, the NDDC said it had intensified efforts to curb the vandalisation of critical infrastructure after seeing several completed and ongoing projects destroyed or left to deteriorate. At a similar programme in Port Harcourt, officials said valuable assets such as solar streetlights had been vandalised shortly after commissioning, calling the trend discouraging and harmful to regional development. The commission’s Rivers office also said the training of local stakeholders had become necessary because of the scale of projects currently being implemented across the Niger Delta.
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That context matters because it shows this is not just an Edo story. It is a regional problem. Across the Niger Delta, the NDDC appears increasingly worried that too many of its interventions are being undermined not only by contractor issues or bureaucratic delays, but by what happens after delivery. Francis Abayomi, who featured both in the Benin engagement and related regional programmes, said poor execution, neglect and lack of maintenance are among the factors working against NDDC projects. In other words, even where a project is completed, its usefulness can still die through indifference.
This is where the story becomes more than a public relations update. NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects because the Commission appears to understand that development is not complete when a contractor leaves site. A project survives only if there is local vigilance, local pressure for proper standards, and local willingness to maintain what has been built. Without that, infrastructure becomes ceremonial: commissioned, photographed, praised and then quietly ruined. The Niger Delta has seen too much of that cycle already,NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects.
The tone of the warning has grown sharper in some states. In Cross River, NDDC officials told stakeholders that any community that allows vandalism of the Commission’s facilities would not receive further intervention. The Commission said communities must take ownership because the projects are meant for their benefit. At that same event, a facilitator said available statistics indicated that about 50 per cent of NDDC projects in the region were no longer functioning as originally implemented because of vandalism and weak community ownership. If accurate, that is a deeply troubling number. It suggests that the development problem is not only about building new assets, but about stopping old ones from being destroyed faster than they can be replaced.
That is why the headline NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects deserves to be read as a warning about the economics of waste. Public infrastructure in the Niger Delta is expensive. Roads, electrification, water systems, shoreline works and social amenities all cost money that is difficult to recover once lost. When a solar lighting system is vandalised, the damage is not just physical. It affects security, mobility and night-time economic activity. When a water scheme is neglected, families pay the cost through health risks and private alternatives. When a community centre or access road falls apart, the burden returns to residents in the form of isolation and hardship, NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects.
There is also a deeper political message here. Many public institutions in Nigeria struggle with trust. Citizens often assume projects are imposed from above, poorly delivered, or designed more for announcement than impact. The NDDC appears to be trying to push back against that distance by insisting that communities become part of project life cycles, from needs assessment to monitoring to protection. Babawale said the Commission bases its budgeting on assessed needs and wants residents involved in the process. That is a significant claim because it invites communities to judge the NDDC not only by what it promises, but by whether it listens and responds when concerns are raised.
Still, the Commission cannot place the whole burden on communities and walk away. If people are to own projects, then those projects must be worth owning. They must be properly designed, honestly executed and built to standards that inspire confidence rather than suspicion. Babawale’s own call for residents to question substandard work points to an old Niger Delta problem: some projects fail not only because they are vandalised, but because they are badly delivered in the first place. Community ownership works best where communities believe the asset genuinely belongs to them and was not merely dumped in their area as a contractor’s token gesture.
That is why the best reading of NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects is this: development in the Niger Delta cannot succeed on contracts alone. It needs maintenance, vigilance, transparency and a sense of shared interest. The NDDC is right to say that communities must stop treating public projects as nobody’s property. But the Commission must also continue to ensure those projects emerge from real needs, meet proper standards and remain answerable to the people in whose name they were built, NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects.
In the end, the message from Benin is bigger than one workshop. NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects because too much of the region’s development history has been weakened by a deadly combination of neglect, vandalism and poor local buy-in. Until that cycle is broken, new projects may keep arriving, but old problems will keep swallowing them. In the Niger Delta, building is only half the work. Keeping what has been built alive is the other half, and perhaps the harder one.
NDDC urges community to own, safeguard projects
