Ogbuku Charges New Directors To Make A Difference In Niger Delta

Dr Samuel Ogbuku, Managing Director of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), has urged the Commission’s recently promoted Directors to make a difference in the discharge of their duties and propel the Commission to greater heights.

Ogbuku, who delivered the charge at the end of a two-week workshop on Leadership and Performance Management for NDDC directing staff in Abuja, said that providing quality services to the people of the Niger Delta was a communal obligation that should be prioritised.

According to him, the objective for sending the new Directors for training was to ensure that they returned to the Commission with the administrative knowledge they had gained in order to make a difference for the good of the region as a whole.

“We’re supposed to be training and retraining our staff,” he explained. This is only the start. I want the directors to pass on their knowledge to others in the NDDC so that they may better appreciate their positions and understand what is expected of them.

“We want to do things differently. We want to improve our services. We want to take up challenges. We want to start with the staff first to ensure that all the staff is properly trained and they understand their roles.”

Ogbuku asked the directors to use the training experiences to improve the administrative processes at NDDC in order to ensure that things were done differently.

“As new directors, you need to understand your roles and your boundaries,” he added. You must also understand your own strengths and know when to use them and when not to. You must recognise that you are public servants, not civil servants. So, these are some of the things we decided you should have.”

“Over the years we have seen a situation where the staff of the NDDC seem to act as politicians, but as directors who have been inducted into the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON), I believe that you are not only going to be ambassadors of NDDC, you are also going to be worthy ambassadors of ASCON,” he said.

He emphasised that he expected to work with directors who realised that they were career public officials aiming to reach their professional peak, rather than those who wanted to be nepotic or tribalistic.

Ogbuku stated that directors should be cautious of their conduct, noting that some of them may mislead their subordinates who look up to them as role models.

Mrs. Cecilia Gayya, Director General of ASCON, stated in her address that training was fundamentally an activity meant to make an employee more effective and productive in the fulfillment of their tasks.

She said that the focus of the training was to ensure efficient and effective application of knowledge, skills, and attitude for improved performance, noting: “The programme was carefully designed and implemented to provide the needed knowledge, skills and capacity to adequately and promptly discharge their responsibilities and thus, make meaningful contributions towards the attainment of the mission and vision of the NDDC.

“The conscientiousness with which you participated in this programme for the past two weeks is a      testimony to your preparedness for the challenges ahead and thus gives us hope that this training will impact positively on your performance, especially as you rise higher in the strategic realm of the management of the Commission.