- President Muhammadu Buhari will hold Nigeria’s oil portfolio in his new Cabinet, rather than trust anyone else with the source of most of Nigeria’s revenue, he told Reuters on Tuesday.
- “I intend to remain the minister of petroleum resources,” Buhari said in an interview on the sidelines of the annual meeting of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
- On breaking up NNPC he says “I haven’t absolutely made up my mind about that. We want to see what we have done in reducing the size and redeploying most of the management. We want to see the impact of that before we decide further.”
- A minister of state will oversee the day-to-day issues of the petroleum sector, he said.
- Buhari has deep knowledge of the oil sector, having been head of the Petroleum Trust Fund under military ruler Sani Abacha in the 1990s and oil minister in the 1970s under President Olusegun Obasanjo.
- This is also not the first time a sitting President will be the head of the Ministry of Petroleum Resources as Obasanjo did the same when he was elected President in 1999.
- Buhari has said he will trace and recover what he has called “mind-boggling” sums of money stolen over the years from the oil sector.
- He said he would re-evaluate the issue in about 18 months.
