Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, said the federal government has failed in the oil and gas and should hands-off the sector for revitalisation.
El-Rufai decried the government’s failure in the oil and gas sector when he appeared on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Thursday when speaking on the seventh edition of KadInvest
According to El-Rufai, the performance of the privatised telecommunications sector has shown that total or full deregulation of the oil and gas sector was the only way out of the problems the sector is frost with.
The former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory said nothing significant has changed with the commercialisation of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company in July 2022, insisting that NNPC constitutes Nigeria’s biggest problem and should be privatised.
He argued that though the Group Chief Executive Officer of NNPC Limited, Mele Kyari may be trying to make an impact, the company has failed and has no business being in the sector.
He went down memory lane, citing an example of the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited which he said was at its lowest ebb until the private sector came in and revolutionized the telecoms business.
El-Rufai noted, “I am giving this example so that when I say the government should get out of oil and gas, people should not think it is crazy; it is not. The Nigerian Government should not be a player in the oil and gas sector. It should just give up and get out, it has failed. By every measure, it has failed.
“This year, NNPC cannot boast of bringing N20,000 to the federation account. We are living on taxes. It is PPTs, royalties, income tax and VAT that are keeping this country going because the NNPC claims that subsidy has taken all the oil revenues. I find it hard to believe”
Commenting on the commercialisation of the NNPC, he restated, “Nothing has changed, they are still taking our money, declaring profit that we don’t see the dividends”.
It would be recalled that the Federal Government recently effected some changes in the nomenclature of the NNPC, registering it with the Corporate Affairs Commission and changing its name to NNPC Limited.
