The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Engineer Andrew Yakubu, has condemned the perception by Nigerians that the agency is riddled with corruption.
Addressing energy correspondents in Abuja at the weekend during an interactive dinner with them at the Sheraton Hotels, the NNPC boss insisted that his agency is not the sole arbiter of decisions in the oil and gas industry.
‘”We should not dwell on perception, it’s pathetic that most serious national issues today are picked on the page of newspapers. By celebrating perception, we end up destroying the system,’’ he said
Yakubu further recalled that NNPC has gone through so many challenges and probes, but that at the end of it all, it always come out clean.
“Our credibility is going down very fast, and unfortunately, we cannot do the business without foreign direct investment. It is very difficult for any person to invest into this country with the prevailing cases wrong perception. The wrong perception is not encouraging business at all. There is the need for paradigm shift. We must watch the masquerade from different angles’.’
In recent times, the NNPC has been engulfed in one scandal or the other, bordering on lack of transparency in the handling of Nigeria’s crude oil business especially in the area of remittances of oil sales and the payment of subsidy payments on kerosene.
