President Muhammadu Buhari says he will supervise the Ministry of Petroleum Resources in order to bring integrity, transparency and responsibility to bear on it. The Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, posted this on his official Facebook page yesterday as excerpts of his Thursday’s interview on an African Independent Television (AIT) programme.
Buhari had Tuesday hinted in an interview he granted one of the foreign media in New York after participating in the 70th United Nations General Assembly that he would head the petroleum ministry.
Adesina was Thursday responding to a question on why Buhari desired to be petroleum minister or whether the president did not believe there are people who could be trusted to properly manage the ministry.
“I think the question we will ask ourselves is: ‘What would the president be bringing to the table, if he is going to supervise the petroleum ministry? He has been minister of petroleum for 31/2 years, that is a lot of experience. Those were years that things were done fairly properly in this country.
“…There are things that never change in life. These include integrity, transparency, truth and responsibility. Those things never change and those are the things the president would bring to bear,”Adesina stated.
Asked why the president had not found a Nigerian with all these qualities to run the petroleum ministry since he assumed office, the presidential spokesman said Buhari would do whatever would make a difference in the country.
“Don’t forget that the buck stops at the president’s table. At the end of his administration, it is going to be called the Buhari administration and not the name of any minister. Therefore, it is very important that what the president feels would make a difference in the country is what he does. At the end of the day, that administration would be rated with his name and not any other name,” Adesina added.
On whether the president’s decision to supervise the ministry would give a particular state two ministerial slots since the constitution stipulates that a minister must be selected from every state, the presidential aide said: “The constitutional requirement you quoted talks about the minimum, it states that there must be 36 number of ministers, at least one from each state.
“We have lived in this country where we had 46, 48 ministers and all that. That already shows you that 36 is the minimum requirement, but this administration is one that wants to cut cost. We don’t expect that it would have a ballooned number of ministers.”
Source: Daily Trust
__________
Follow us on Twitter at @thesignalng
Copyright 2015 SIGNAL. Permission to use portions of this article is granted provided appropriate credits are given to www.signalng.com and other relevant sources.
