‘NNPC is a money pit instead of a cash cow,’ Sanusi demands disbandment of company

The former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Sanusi Lamido, on Saturday demanded the disbandment of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC).

Sanusi made the call at the 7th edition of the Kaduna Investment Summit (KADinvest 7.0) organised by the Kaduna Investment Promotion Agency.

The deposed Emir of Kano, and the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, have been pushing for the disbandment of the company over several years of underperformance.

Sanusi said: “NNPC is a money pit instead of a cash cow; it should be unbundled and disbanded. More can be had from simply levying royalties and CIT on private players following models like Petronas and Petrobras.

“Beyond the challenging global context, Nigeria has problems entirely of its own making where oil revenues which were once the lifeblood of the Federal Government, have been in secular decline for over a decade. This has been happening regardless of the oil price environment.

“In some ways, Nigeria’s problems are not a failure of the system because it is working as one would expect, but a loss of design and a failure of implementation.

“In the current environment, the first and most obvious problem is the existence of the fuel subsidy and opportunities this creates for fraud, the average daily fuel consumption in Nigeria (by the NNPC’s admission) is 66 million litres per day, and on some days as high as 100 million litres per day. This is roughly equivalent to where Indonesia (2019), a country with nearly three times Nigeria’s GDP per capita, two times the number of vehicles and 2.5 times the size of the road network.