Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has commended the transition of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd from a public corporation to a limited liability company.
President Muhammadu Buhari officially unveiled the NNPC as a limited company on Tuesday, noting that the transition would afford the company to operate under the best international business practices in transparency, governance, and commercial viability.
Atiku, who recognized that the transition was not only a step in the right direction, said the NNPC has the potential to become a world-class company.
“I had in 2018 made public my plans to reform the NNPC to make it more profitable, transparent and efficient. The APC-led government denigrated me for my patriotic vision.
“But today, I am happy to note that the same government has taken a tentative step along the lines of the suggestions that I had made. It is a step in the right direction, but we are still far from what I had envisaged.
“I hope I’ll have the opportunity to complete the process of turning the NNPC into a genuinely world-class company in the mould of NLNG, Aramco of Saudi Arabia and Petrobras of Brazil, where Nigerians and institutions will invest in,” said the PDP presidential flagbearer.
In 2019, the then All Progressives Congress national chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, accused Atiku of pursuing a capitalist agenda over his plan to privatize the NNPC.
“When you hear Atiku say ‘I will privatise NNPC even if they will kill me’, I don’t even know why he needed to add that one. Who will kill him? He is not speaking to you because you don’t have money to buy NNPC. I don’t know how many Nigerians have the money to buy NNPC.
“He is speaking to his western audience. When he says he will float the naira, you know whose language, whose values his parroting. Those are IMF agenda. He wants to float the naira.
“So, if in Atiku’s word, floating the dollar means $1 to N1,000, so be it. You think he doesn’t know what he is talking? Of course, there are countries which, if they have their way, they want Nigeria to remain perpetually under-developed,” Oshiomhole had said during an interview on Channels Television.
