Barely
24 hours after President Muhammadu Buhari dismissed all the members on
the Board of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, a Lagos-based
human rights lawyer, Festus Keyamo, has reiterated his call for the
erstwhile Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke,
to be probed.
Keyamo had, on June 17, written a letter
to the Senate President and Speaker of the House of Representatives
asking the National Assembly to commence investigations into the
activities of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, especially
with regard to the crude oil swap programme and offshore processing
agreements of the company.
He alleged that some NNPC officials, in collaboration with some local companies, were looting the country’s resources.
In an interview with Sahara TV
on Saturday, Keyamo said there was an array of issues necessitating
investigations into Alison-Madueke’s management of the ministry.
He said, “It is about a whole lot of
issues. In my petition, I was particular about what has come to be known
as the crude oil swap deals. Under this arrangement, we never knew that
a lot of our crude oil was given to private oil companies in exchange
for their bringing in petroleum products. Under one arrangement, they
were supposed to take it out. We signed (out) the products and then took
them back to Nigeria whether they were petroleum products or
by-products.
“Under the other arrangement, we were
supposed to be given the crude oil to sell at the international market
and then use the money to import petroleum products into the country.
Now, there have been reports in the papers of late that under these
arrangements, certain Nigerian oil and gas companies made very huge,
unwarranted profits and the simple reason is that they imported far less
than the crude oil that they bought.
“Under this arrangement, some of them
bought private jets, property around the world and began to live large.
Certain individuals in the NNPC were seen as collaborators in this
deceitful and grand plot. Before the minister left office, she picked up
her pen and wrote a petition to the Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission, inviting it to probe these individuals and these groups. And
I asked myself some imple questions: It is a bit curious who had
supervisory authority over these individuals and these issues.”
According to the legal practitioner,
Alison-Madueke had access to all the relevant documents. He explained
that she could have easily called for the offenders and given queries to
them.
“Why did she wait till the last minute
to write a petition to the EFCC to probe these deals? And I told myself:
It is not a safe person who runs to a police station to complain that
is always the victim of the crime,” Keyamo said.
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