In a fresh interview with ThisDay, immediate past Minister of
Petroleum Resources, Dieziani Alison Madueke reacted to all
the allegations of corruptions leveled against her while she
served as Minister. Alison-Madueke said contrary to reports,
she never stole from the Nigerian state. She said she worked
for the betterment of Nigeria while she was Minister and
sacrificed her time to ensure the petroleum sector was
developed.
In the interview, Alison-Madueke acknowledged that she and
her team might have made mistakes. Read full interview after
the cut...
"Did we make mistakes? There would always be mistakes.
People would always make mistakes. Everybody make
mistakes and there is no question about that. Have we learnt
from our mistakes? Of course we have. But please do not say
I stole $20 billion or $18.5 billion because I did not at any
point in time. And if NNPC misappropriated funds or so, they
have the entire explanation and more forensic audit should be
done to determine how and why. But people should not make
damaging accusations which have nothing to do with an
individual. At no point did I steal from the Nigerian state. And
if NNPC misappropriated funds or so, they have the entire
explanation and more forensic audit should be done to
determine how and why. But people should not make
damaging accusations which have nothing to do with an
individual. At no point did I steal from the Nigerian state. In
fact, the first mantra I had from the time I came in was that I
will never touch anything that has to do with the Federation
Account and I never did and I will take that to my grave. So I
will suggest that this issue of $20 billion or $18 billion be
dropped because that is the major problem I had with my job.
I was accused of unsavoury things, but which were actually
accusations against NNPC and the audit was deployed to
clarify all these things. So let us deal with the issues. I have
never gone around accusing people of doing this or that, I
have always stuck with the issues even when I was the most
abused minister, I was professional, I stuck to the issues and
responded only to the issues.”she said
The former Minister addressed allegations made against her
by Emir of Kano and former CBN governor, Sanusi Muhammad
1st, that she disobeyed the directive of former President Umar
Yar'Adua to stop the subsidy plan on Kerosine.
"Let me just make this very clear to Nigeria as a whole
because this is an area of great pain for me. That Sanusi
should say I sustained the subsidy is not true, when very
clearly in 2009, the late President Yar’Adua gave a written
directive to the late Minister of Petroleum Resources Alhaji
Rilwan Lukman that he should remove the subsidy on
DPK. This subsidy on DPK was never removed by the late
Minister of Petroleum Resources, whom I considered to be
somebody that I regarded almost as a mentor. For reasons
best known to late Alhaji Rilwan Lukman and the then
economic team, the Finance Minister and others, they never
implemented the directive to remove the subsidy. By law and
the Petroleum Act, you must gazette such a removal for it to
become law and of course it has to be published so that
Nigerians would know that there has been a change in the
price of the petroleum product. It is illegal to do it or to say
you have done it, if you have not gazetted it. Even before that,
former President Goodluck Jonathan who was the vice-
president at that time, had also clarified, even in a public
media broadcast and in person as well, that the subsidy was
never removed. So I sought clarification from him and he also
made the clarification clear in a public media broadcast about
a year and a half ago, that the subsidy was never removed.
So at no time did I go against a president’s directive. It is not
possible that I would have come in as a Minister of Petroleum
in 2010 and found that kerosene subsidy no longer existed
and that it had been gazetted and I would have suddenly
upturned it. Government is a continuum and so it was not
possible that I could have done that. So I feel very pained that
Sanusi would make it sound like I was the one who went
against late President Yar’Adua’s directive. I think this should
clarify this issue once and for all. It’s high time Nigerians
got some insight into your personality, because there were
lots of complaints that you are aloof, inaccessible and some
even alleged that you were an absentee minister who spent
more time at home than in the office"she said.
The former Minister also addressed the allegation of renting a
N10 million jet for personal use as Minister
"Well, I don’t know whether that issue is still in court. But the
reason that I went to court was simple. First of all, nobody
can lease a jet for N10 billion over a period. You can buy three
jets for N10 billion. So that was obviously a nonsensical
argument and I did not lease any jet. The NNPC leases jets
and NNPC leased those jets to the best of my knowledge
because at that point in time, they had no official planes. As
an oil and gas ministry, we have purview over everything and
it was actually very wrong that we had to borrow planes from
these multinationals whom we were supposed to oversight.
So over the years, I am talking about over the last 15 or 20
years, NNPC had either owned, leased or borrowed, both jets
and helicopters. That was the case when I came in.
Yes, we had a very old jet which nobody was going to touch
and another jet had just been bought by late Alhaji Lukman
just before he left, a Hawker. Unfortunately, the moment it
came, because it had been sitting unused for over a year it
became a problem. In fact, NNPC was advised to sell it
because it was a problematic model and had sat unused for a
long period. They were advised to sell it, but they didn’t sell
it. Then after a year of its purchase, it crash-landed in Nsubi
and we had to actually give it out for spare parts to the
National Security Adviser’s office at the end of the day. It was
during this period that they leased the private jets for
executive movement and operations in general, which we also
used, as had always been the case. In that respect, the
reason for the leasing and the amount involved are all
available and I am sure the NNPC would be willing to give
that information to whoever wants to look at them for public
records. So again, it was a fabrication that came out from
nowhere and was thrown at us as if suddenly out of the blues
and for the first time in history, the NNPC was leasing jets or
helicopters".
The Former Minister stated that the jet was never for personal
use "No it was not for my personal use, it was for executive
movement, which is has always been the case. I am saying
just like the $20 billion, you find something, you throw it on
the person to feel smart or to make it look as if the person is
junketing all over the place or as if nobody had done that
before in the annals of the NNPC. Of course we were not
junketing all over the place. To be very honest, if they had
never done that contract to lease the jet, we would have been
hiring at a higher cost and which probably would have caused
less of an issue. But to be frank, the lease that was put in
place, to the best of my knowledge, was done with a company
which even Shell and others have been using. So there was a
known company with a very good track record and was being
used in the industry by other multinationals.
But the other issue that you raised in terms of the National
Assembly was not even because of the plane. The reason the
plane was used in the legal brief was because that was the
topical issue at the time. It was because in that year, the
Minister of Petroleum had been summoned to the National
Assembly, according to my officers, almost 200 times. And at
this point, it became apparent that we were not going to be
able to work or to perform our duties as a government agency
anymore. So it was now becoming a situation whereby every
week, they summoned the Minister of Petroleum, one of the
parastatals or NNPC, and it was now becoming virtually
impossible to actually perform our duties as an MDA. As
such, at that point, our lawyers just felt we needed to stop it
because it was becoming extremely disruptive. That was the
basis on which the legal action that was taken, just to allow
us some space to continue working" she said
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