Omoyele Sowore (middle)
Presidential campaign ahead of the 2019 elections has officially kicked off, and as expected, the verbal fireworks from the candidates have began.
On Wednesday, the Presidential candidate of the Africa Action Congress (AAC), Omoyele Sowore was a guest of Bounce News’ #60Minutes, where he entertained questions from viewers on his campaign agenda.
One of the issues he spoke about is the proposed sale of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC by former vice president Atiku Abubakar who is the candidate of the PDP.
Sowore was asked what he planned to do with the corporation if elected since the current administration’s efforts at un-bundling it have yielded little results.
Here is what he said: “The person who unbundled NNPC probably didn’t even understand the meaning of unbundling. You cannot unbundle NNPC and then make yourself the minister of Petroleum Resources. And then he made the Chief of Staff the member of the board of NNPC.”
On the proposed sale of NNPC by Atiku, he said: “The man who wants to sell NNPC spent 8 years of his life as the vice president of Nigeria selling off whatever they could sell, but where did that take us?
“The NNPC that Atiku is planning to sell, he is not going to use the money from that sale on Nigerian people. In the first place, who is Atiku going to sell NNPC to? He is going to sell it to Atiku.
“Atiku bought a bunch of companies. He is one of a few Nigerians that cannot explain how he made his wealth and if he is already telling you that he wants to sell NNPC, you can understand that he is going to put Nigeria on Alibaba for sale.
“And that is why he is leading a charge; they are charging towards Nigeria right now, a bunch of criminals are waiting in the wings so that as soon as Atiku wins, they can’t wait to sell whatever they can find in this country to themselves and take over the country and all of you who are ‘Atikulating’ will find yourselves completely ‘Atikulooted’ by the time they are done. That is what they are used to doing.”
But what does he plan to do with the corporation if he is elected?
He said: “What we need to understand is that this entity belongs to the Nigerian people. Run the place transparently with very competent and honest Nigerians and make the wealth from there available to the Nigerian people.
“You know what I would prefer to do instead of giving oil blocks to politicians, I will give it to universities, so that whatever profit they make, they can invest in education.
“They can invest it as part of the university’s wealth to create more opportunity for young people to go to school. I am just giving that as an example, it is not part of our manifesto yet, but these are progressive and creative ways of investing in the future.”
