Kaduna State Governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, said in Abuja on Monday that the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, must be killed by all means possible.
A visibly angry el-Rufai, while speaking at the 7th Wole Soyinka Centre Media Lecture Series, lambasted the national oil firm for being run like a parallel government, adding that he was hopeful that the current administration of President Muhammadu Buhari would “kill” the corporation.
The governor called for the setting up of another national oil firm as he argued that the present NNPC would kill Nigeria if it was allowed to continue running.
“If you don’t kill the NNPC, it will kill Nigeria,” el-Rufai said.
According to him, the oil firm is riddled with corruption and until it is destroyed completely and rebuilt from the scratch, there will be no headway for Nigeria.
El-Rufai argued that with his experience as a former Director-General of the Bureau of Public Enterprise, it was possible to destroy a bad organisation and turn it into a good firm.
He maintained that Nigeria’s collective wealth was being feasted upon by the less than 1,000 employees of the corporation, alleging that the NNPC only remitted 42 per cent of what it ought to remit to the Federal Government for about three years.
The governor used statistics to defend his recommendation on why the current NNPC must be destroyed
He said in 2014, the country produced on the average about 2.2 million barrels of crude oil per day, while importing most of its daily consumption of 43.5 million litres of refined petroleum products.
He stated that the reliance on imports of refined products led to unsustainable expenses on questionable subsidy payments, exemplified by the $8.99bn spent in the 18 months between January 2012 and June 2013.
El-Rufai said, “About N971bn was budgeted for subsidy payments in 2014 alone (more than twice that …Read More
Source:: New Mail
