BY OUR REPORTERS—The former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Kingsley Moghalu on Wednesday called for the scrapping of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) as a step towards the economic growth of the country.
Mr. Moghalu stated this while delivering a lecture titled “Overcoming Poverty: The Secret of the Wealth of Nations” on Wednesday in Lagos at the 3rd Annual Lecture of the Centre for Financial Journalism (CFJ).
According to him, the scrapping of the NNPC will bring sanity to the petroleum sector,while noting that “NNPC as it is presently is more of a “government ATM machine.”
“The NNPC must be partially privatized like the NLG which is functioning well. It is making profit. It is obvious that the answer is public private participation, so that there can be discipline in its operations.
“The other one (NNPC) is a government ATM, political ATM. So there is no real oversight. Transparency is not there. We could have made a lot of money from it but our refineries are dead. We are a country that exports crude petroleum products and imports refined petroleum products. Is that not the clinical definition of madness.”
On Land Use Act, he said, “the constitutional repeal of the land use act which is trapping the wealth of Nigerians citizens in the hands choking grip of state bureaucracy because one of the need for a successful capitalism is property right if you have land that land is vested in the state.
“This means you are just a tenant with a C of O instead of having a free home which expands what you can use that land for in terms of generating capital,” therefore he recommended that it should be scrapped in order to promote economic growth.
On deregulation he said: “If we do not deregulate it, we cannot be free of all this running around on how to decide the price of petroleum products and fuel scarcity will continue.
“I saw a newspaper that showed fuel scarcity in the 1970s and somebody that we are very familiar with who was the then minister of petroleum said the problem will soon be over. This was 40 years ago and we are still facing the same challenges.
He stressed the need for the establishment and consistent application of a clear economic philosophy of entrepreneurial capitalism in the context of a developmental state as a guiding framework for the Nigerian economy.
