PAST LEADERS ENCOURAGES CORRUPTION TO BLOSSOM- BUHARI

President Mohammadu Buhari has lamented on the state and rate of deterioration that has happened to government agencies and parastatals, especially the oil sector since he left office as the military head of state and minister of petroleum sebsequently.

The president on Tuesday, August 25, said those who ruled the country between then and now allowed the nation’s infrastructure such as the refineries, port authorities, telecommunications etc to collapse in order to give their colleagues the headway to steal and loot the country blind of its infrastructure.

The President through Mr Garba Shehu, his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, blamed the past administrations for the current situation and deterioration of the nations economy, the petroleum sector and the dilemma which the country found itself in spending billions of Naira annually on alleged petroleum subsidies.

The continuos payment and steady increase of huge petroleum subsidy bills which was brought about by the deliberate neglect of the nations refineriies, coupled with pipelines vandalism, neglect and some other related infrastructures allows the importation of crude products to thrive in Nigeria.

He said he was certain that if the development of the country’s domestic refining capacity and petroleum products distribution network had kept pace with national demand, there won’t have been any need for the huge subsidies currently being paid to importers.

He urged the chairman and members of RMAFC, to come up with more proposals to rescue Nigerians from what he described as the “wicked manipulation” of the country’s oil industry by corrupt operators.

The president also said that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation(NNPC), the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and other MDAs which previously relied on the laws establishing them to retain all or part of revenues collected by them, did so illegally and must now comply with the Nigerian constitution by paying all revenues to the Federation Account.

In a recent report, the Chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), Elias Mbam has said that a new salary and allowance package for Nigeria’s senators and house of representative members will be made available by September.