By Jeremiah Urowayino
The Itsekiri Progressive Political Forum has commended President Bola Tinubu over the appointment of Engr. Felix Omatsola Ogbe as the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), describing the appointment as a clear demonstration of this administration’s espousal of the age-long metaphor of the universal desirability of a square peg in a square hole.
Speaking yesterday in Warri, Delta State, the coordinator of the group, Professor Lucky Akaruese, who is also a stalwart of the All Progressive Congress (APC) in Delta State said that Engr. Felix Ogbe is an embodiment of knowledge of the oil and gas industries having risen to the management level in one of the most entrenched and formidable international oil companies before retirement remains most suited and equipped to pilot the affairs of NCDMB.
According to him, Ogbe being a one-time central global player in the oil and gas extractive industries and having acquired diversified knowledge and experiences, is thus in the best position not only to accomplish the set objectives of the Board, particularly in ensuring the full implementation and realization of the requisite and much-desired growth of Nigerian contents in the diversified realities associated with the oil and gas related industries but will advance the Board to global reckoning whereby Nigeria will gradually achieve technological and administrative self-sufficiencies in all oil and gas related arrangements and activities.
“The new executive secretary of NCDMB will in no distant time place Nigeria’s oil and gas industries in such an enviable position in terms of significantly advancing Nigeria’s quest for technological self-sufficiency and other requisite Nigeria’s contents; which will make Nigeria become the toast of third world’s oil and gas producing countries through achieving significant proportion in the local contents aspect in oil and gas industries in Nigeria.
“Felix Ogbe’s contribution to APC in the Itsekiri axis in particular cannot be over emphasis, so thank President Bola Tinibu for appointing Felix Ogbe; and further implored the president to note that ‘the Itsekiri ethnic nation remain the second oil and gas bearing and producing ethnic nation in the country, and therefore deserve to be so recognized.
“We hope that the appointment of Felix Ogbe as the executive secretary of NCDMB should be the beginning in the much-desired effort to redress the past denials of Itsekiri’s daughter and sons in federal appointments’ and assure the president that the Itsekiri will as usual reciprocate “.
