Immediate past Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, in this interview with Ijeoma Nwogwugwu of Thisday Newspapers, finally addressed several of the questions that had been begging for answers.
Among other issues, she spoke on her accomplishments and the structural problems of the petroleum sector, Emir Mohammad Sanusi II and the $20 billion question, the PwC forensic audit, her attempts to turn around NNPC and its exploration and production subsidiary NPDC, the efforts to end the fuel subsidy regime and privatise the refineries, the contending forces and personalities whom she came up against as minister, her stand off with the National Assembly, her current absence from the country, and the general perception and rumours that swirled around her stewardship. Excerpts: There have been so many things said about the Petroleum Ministry and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) – about the corruption, inefficiency and what have you – during your stewardship. What were the major challenges and why was it difficult to transform NNPC to become self-sustaining financially and better positioned to become a truly national oil company? I think that quite clearly in terms of NNPC, we strove from the beginning due to the historical challenges that NNPC had. As you know, over the past 25 years, NNPC has been severally known to have a non-transparent opacity about the way and manner in which it does its business. Some of these might be perceived, a lot of it also real. So when we came in 2010 to 2011, the intent was to very quickly look at ways and means to open up NNPC in particular, because NNPC is the core parastatal with operational and legal parameters binding it.
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