Nigeria to Shift Gears to Agriculture in Fight Against Oil Corruption

Nigeria to Shift Gears to Agriculture in Fight Against Oil Corruption

Nigeria’s democratically elected President Muhammadu Buhari plans to split the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. in two, creating a regulator and a vehicle for investments, said Femi Adesina, a presidential spokesman, to cite Bloomberg.

“No Nigerian leader, including Buhari himself from the 1980s, has managed to sanitize the oil sector,” said Philippe de Pontet, head of the Africa practice at the Eurasia Group in New York. “Buhari’s challenge is not only to depoliticize NNPC but to disentangle its vested interests and its rogue commercial operations, which won’t be easy.”

Buhari was the country’s oil minister during military rule in the 1970s, when the NNPC itself was set up. It is the country’s largest government-owned company with 24,000 employees.

Buhari was elected on an anti-corruption platform in March and has already fired the board and management of the company, ordered a review of oil-swap contracts and barred 113 vessels from loading oil and gas.

With declining oil prices the Nigerian president has also argued that it was “time to go back to the land. We must face the reality that the petroleum we had depended on for so long will no longer suffice. We campaigned heavily on agriculture, and we are ready to assist as many want to go into agricultural ventures”.

Buhari made these remarks at an audience with Dr Kanayo Nwanze, the President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, reported AllAfrica.com

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