The Presidential Candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Prince Adewole Adebayo has promised that from the day he is sworn in as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, he would make full disclosure where the country’s money is.
He said for too long, the whereabout of Nigeria’s money has been shrouded in mystery.
“One of the things that you, the people of Nigerians will know when I get to office is that you will know where your money is. There is too much mystery about Nigerian money. Even President Buhari today cannot tell you how much money Nigeria has. Board members of NNPC, now NNPL, don’t know how much the company has. Minister of Finance does not know where government money is. You will have a full forensic of where your money is once i get into office,” he stated.
Adebayo is one the many Nigerians who aren’t too excited about the pomp and pageantry that heralded the Federal Government’s new Nigeria National Petroleum Limited, NNPL, formerly NNPC, as according to him, the change of name without change of mind will not lead to any positive result.
“If there is no change of circumstances, change of mind on the part of those running it, it will amount to the same result. The corporate culture and corporate governance must be there to make it functional. I will review a lot of it when I become President. I will remove the aspect of controlling and negotiating and collecting revenue on behalf of government and it will be taking away from them completely. They have gone too far in this collection of revenue and in wrong direction”.
The lingering crisis between Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the Federal Government over condition of service may soon come to an amicable end as President Muhammadu Buhari ordered the Minister of education, Mallam Adamu to resolve the issue within two weeks.
But the President’s order, for Adebayo, is just an order that has no content. Hear him: “This new mandate given to the Minister, I think, is quite too little and late. It’s better than nothing though. My fear is whether the Minister will be able to act on it, the person whom you call Minister and he voluntarily answers should know that this is one of the worst crisis a country can go through and he doesn’t need the President to order him to deal with it. It’s possible the Minister might have sent his recommendations to the President’s table and he might not have seen it. Ordinarily, one should have heard that the Minister is fired. I think the President is to blame for this.
“The President has children, his children have friends, his Ministers have children. So, he is not living under a rock. He knows ASUU is on strike, giving 2 week ultimatum to his Minister now is more of a later day theatre. The ASUU crisis shouldn’t take more than 6 hours to resolve for anybody determined to do the work, because their demands are not new, they are old demands, same demands when I was an undergraduate at Ife. Thought the President should have taken a memo from the Ministers of Education, Labour and Finance, sign his own part of the agreement and send it to ASUU to sign theirs. I don’t think ASUU will change anything in their demands, it will be unpatriotic to do so”.
He said Nigeria’s over dependence on oil is because of lack of ingenuity of the leaders, explaining that petroleum, during his reign as President, especially his first year, will be in the withdrawal zone.
“Nigeria makes about $20 million from ginger. Even in a good year, we don’t gross up to $120 million dollars a year. If only we invest a little more to squeeze our ginger and get ginger oil, we will be making $1.4 billion from ginger oil. If you go into the value chain of some of the products, you will see that petroleum isn’t a big deal. At the peak of Jonathan’s tenure when oil price was above $100 per barrel and everybody was clapping, I wasn’t really impressed because I have an oil palm plantation that I was selling my palm oil at $660 per barrel.
“This was why Micheal Opara created the Ada Palm in the Eastern region. I am not the kind of President who is running for office because of NNPCL. Presidency under me won’t share oil money. Rather, I will put the Federal Government allocation of the money into sovereign fund and then dedicate it to building hospitals all over the place. I am not going to mainstream oil money into my budget. The present generation has spent enough of oil money, we need to keep for the future,” he said.
