Former Minister of Education, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, has called for an independent audit of business dealings between the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) and the Dangote Refinery.
The call followed the revelation made last week by the Chief Executive Officer of the Dangote Group and owner of the Dangote Refinery, Aliko Dangote that NNPC had capped its equity in the Dangote Petroleum Refinery at 7.2 percent instead of the speculated 20 percent.
“The agreement was actually 20 percent which we had with NNPC, and they did not pay the balance of the money up till last year; then we gave them another extension up till June (2024), and they said that they would remain where they have already paid, which is 7.2 percent. So NNPC owns only 7.2 percent, not 20 percent.” Dangote said.
NNPC also confirmed Dangote’s disclosure, saying it decided not to invest further in the refinery.
Reacting to these controversies, Ezekwesili through her X (formerly Twitter) handle, said she had earlier decided not to speak on the Dangote refinery-NNPC saga.
“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 unraveled for public accountability. And urgently, too.
“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?” she queried.
The former Education minister recalled that during former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, she told the NNPC that it could not run solely as a federation.
“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.”
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