A Political Economist, Professor Pat Utomi has criticized the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for its inefficiencies over the last two decades. He stated that the organization has failed to implement meaningful reforms and rebuild the Nigerian refinery despite receiving funds from the Federal Government.
He was particularly critical of the NNPC’s longstanding practice of claiming excessive petrol consumption levels, which he believes are not supported by statistical projections for Nigerian demand. He advocated for a complete overhaul of the NNPC, suggesting that all personnel responsible for these distortions should be dismissed. He recounted a conversation from the 1990s with a former NNPC group managing director, who insinuated that the NNPC had already been effectively privatized but without proper financial accountability from its purported owners.
He said in an interview with Channels TV, ‘I have been saying this for over 20 years that we need to get rid of subsidy because it’s distorting the economy and price systems. And the biggest source of this distortion is the NNPC, what reforms have they carried out in NNPC since they got there? We should fire all the guys in NNPC! We have been paying the NNPC to run a refinery that doesn’t exist for over 12 to 15 years. These are people who have said that we are consuming six times the level that are not normal statistical projection that Nigerians can consume of petrol.
They should all have been sacked a long time ago. There was a remark that was made to me when I was researching the book on managing uncertainty back in the 90s. I was interviewing a immediate past group managing director of NNPC and I said to him that should we privatize NNPC. And he looked at me and said, is it not privatized already? I was surprised and he said, NNPC has been long privatized but the problem is those who own it did not pay for it. And when we get to power, we know that this is a major sort of distortion. And then we are talking about removing subsidy and we are not touching NNPC.”….Seē _ Morē
