A former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili, has recalled how the Obasanjo government she served had to confront what she calls the ‘Federal Republic of NNPC’ syndrome.
She decried the overbearing syndrome as she called for an independent audit of why the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited capped its investment in the Dangote Petroleum Refinery at 7.2 per cent instead of the planned 20 per cent.
As ‘The Punch’ reports, Ezekwesili said she had earlier decided not to speak on the Dangote refinery-NNPC saga while reacting to the matter through her official X handle.
“However, as more and more information filtered out from both parties, we can reasonably conclude that something seriously murky has gone on and needs to be fully unravelled for public accountability. And urgently, too,” she stated.
The former minister added, “How can a project that by all definition attained the stature of a ‘national interest project’ be marred in this depth of embarrassing controversy that is playing out in the full glare of the local and international investing community?
“Did the Nigerian government not tell us it borrowed $3.3bn from Afriexim-Bank to take a stake in the Dangote refinery?”
Ezekwesili recalled that during former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, she used to tell the NNPC that it could not continue to run as a federation on its own.
“When we were in government, I often told the NNPC leadership that they cannot carry on as though there is a ‘Federal Republic of the NNPC’ just because they think of themselves as ‘the goose that lays the golden egg’.
“The opacity of the NNPC was the reason we took great delight in designing the multi-stakeholders Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency International in those early 2000s that I pioneered as Chairperson.
“We went above global minimum voluntary standards of transparency requirements by entrenching ours in an Act that established NEITI as the transparency regulator of the oil and minerals sector,” she explained.
She called on President Bola Tinubu “to immediately use the instrumentality of NEITI to launch an independent audit of the Dangote refinery-NNPC transaction to offer the public the true state of play.”
