In a fresh interview with ThisDay ,
immediate past Minister of Petroleum
Resources, Dieziani Alison Madueke reacted
to all the allegations of corruptions leveled
against her while she served as Minister.
Alison-Madueke said contrary to reports,
she never stole from the Nigerian state. She
said she worked for the betterment of
Nigeria while she was Minister and
sacrificed her time to ensure the petroleum
sector was developed.
In the interview, Alison-Madueke
acknowledged that she and her team might
have made mistakes. Read full interview
after the cut...

"Did we make mistakes? There would always
be mistakes. People would always make
mistakes. Everybody make mistakes and
there is no question about that. Have we
learnt from our mistakes? Of course we
have. But please do not say I stole $20
billion or $18.5 billion because I did not at
any point in time. And if NNPC
misappropriated funds or so, they have the
entire explanation and more forensic audit
should be done to determine how and why.
But people should not make damaging
accusations which have nothing to do with an
individual. At no point did I steal from the
Nigerian state. And if NNPC
misappropriated funds or so, they have the
entire explanation and more forensic audit
should be done to determine how and why.
But people should not make damaging
accusations which have nothing to do with an
individual. At no point did I steal from the
Nigerian state. In fact, the first mantra I
had from the time I came in was that I will
never touch anything that has to do with the
Federation Account and I never did and I
will take that to my grave. So I will suggest
that this issue of $20 billion or $18 billion
be dropped because that is the major
problem I had with my job. I was accused of
unsavoury things, but which were actually
accusations against NNPC and the audit was
deployed to clarify all these things. So let
us deal with the issues. I have never gone
around accusing people of doing this or that,
I have always stuck with the issues even
when I was the most abused minister, I was
professional, I stuck to the issues and
responded only to the issues.”she said
The former Minister addressed allegations
made against her by Emir of Kano and
former CBN governor, Sanusi Muhammad
1st, that she disobeyed the directive of
former President Umar Yar'Adua to stop the
subsidy plan on Kerosine.

"Let me just make this very clear to Nigeria
as a whole because this is an area of great
pain for me. That Sanusi should say I
sustained the subsidy is not true, when very
clearly in 2009, the late President Yar’Adua
gave a written directive to the late Minister
of Petroleum Resources Alhaji Rilwan
Lukman that he should remove the subsidy
on DPK. This subsidy on DPK was never
removed by the late Minister of Petroleum
Resources, whom I considered to be
somebody that I regarded almost as a
mentor. For reasons best known to late Alhaji
Rilwan Lukman and the then economic team,
the Finance Minister and others, they never
implemented the directive to remove the
subsidy. By law and the Petroleum Act, you
must gazette such a removal for it to
become law and of course it has to be
published so that Nigerians would know that
there has been a change in the price of the
petroleum product. It is illegal to do it or to
say you have done it, if you have not
gazetted it. Even before that, former
President Goodluck Jonathan who was the
vice-president at that time, had also
clarified, even in a public media broadcast
and in person as well, that the subsidy was
never removed. So I sought clarification
from him and he also made the clarification
clear in a public media broadcast about a
year and a half ago, that the subsidy was
never removed. So at no time did I go
against a president’s directive. It is not
possible that I would have come in as a
Minister of Petroleum in 2010 and found
that kerosene subsidy no longer existed and
that it had been gazetted and I would have
suddenly upturned it. Government is a
continuum and so it was not possible that I
could have done that. So I feel very pained
that Sanusi would make it sound like I was
the one who went against late President
Yar’Adua’s directive. I think this should
clarify this issue once and for all. It’s
high time Nigerians got some insight into
your personality, because there were lots of
complaints that you are aloof, inaccessible
and some even alleged that you were an
absentee minister who spent more time at
home than in the office"she said.

The former Minister also addressed the
allegation of renting a N10 million jet for
personal use as Minister
"Well, I don’t know whether that issue is still
in court. But the reason that I went to court
was simple. First of all, nobody can lease a
jet for N10 billion over a period. You can
buy three jets for N10 billion. So that was
obviously a nonsensical argument and I did
not lease any jet. The NNPC leases jets and
NNPC leased those jets to the best of my
knowledge because at that point in time,
they had no official planes. As an oil and
gas ministry, we have purview over
everything and it was actually very wrong
that we had to borrow planes from these
multinationals whom we were supposed to
oversight. So over the years, I am talking
about over the last 15 or 20 years, NNPC
had either owned, leased or borrowed, both
jets and helicopters. That was the case when
I came in.
Yes, we had a very old jet which nobody was
going to touch and another jet had just been
bought by late Alhaji Lukman just before he
left, a Hawker. Unfortunately, the moment
it came, because it had been sitting unused
for over a year it became a problem. In
fact, NNPC was advised to sell it because it
was a problematic model and had sat unused
for a long period. They were advised to sell
it, but they didn’t sell it. Then after a year
of its purchase, it crash-landed in Nsubi
and we had to actually give it out for spare
parts to the National Security Adviser’s
office at the end of the day. It was during
this period that they leased the private jets
for executive movement and operations in
general, which we also used, as had always
been the case. In that respect, the reason
for the leasing and the amount involved are
all available and I am sure the NNPC would
be willing to give that information to
whoever wants to look at them for public
records. So again, it was a fabrication that
came out from nowhere and was thrown at
us as if suddenly out of the blues and for
the first time in history, the NNPC was
leasing jets or helicopters".
The Former Minister stated that the jet was
never for personal use "No it was not for
my personal use, it was for executive
movement, which is has always been the
case. I am saying just like the $20 billion,
you find something, you throw it on the
person to feel smart or to make it look as if
the person is junketing all over the place or
as if nobody had done that before in the
annals of the NNPC. Of course we were not
junketing all over the place. To be very
honest, if they had never done that contract
to lease the jet, we would have been hiring
at a higher cost and which probably would
have caused less of an issue. But to be
frank, the lease that was put in place, to
the best of my knowledge, was done with a
company which even Shell and others have
been using. So there was a known company
with a very good track record and was being
used in the industry by other multinationals.
But the other issue that you raised in terms
of the National Assembly was not even
because of the plane. The reason the plane
was used in the legal brief was because that
was the topical issue at the time. It was
because in that year, the Minister of
Petroleum had been summoned to the
National Assembly, according to my officers,
almost 200 times. And at this point, it
became apparent that we were not going to
be able to work or to perform our duties as
a government agency anymore. So it was
now becoming a situation whereby every
week, they summoned the Minister of
Petroleum, one of the parastatals or NNPC,
and it was now becoming virtually impossible
to actually perform our duties as an MDA.
As such, at that point, our lawyers just felt
we needed to stop it because it was
becoming extremely disruptive. That was the
basis on which the legal action that was
taken, just to allow us some space to
continue working" she said

lindaikeji..com/2015/06/at-no-point-did-i-steal-from-nigerian.html

Ma
U did ur best for dis nation
Only God will reward u
Men will persecute u
Buh we d naija youths re solidly behind u

OREMUSSANCTUS:

Buh we d naija youths re solidly behind u

Speak for yourself mister. Wtf is 'we naija youths'. Smh

Just d same way stella odua did not steal.....
Why are you confesing before been quized? Wait till d new EFCC chairman asume duty.
No body under Jonathan stole...cos stealing is not corruption and infact how much did Nwobodo "stole"

Hmm time shall tell but when did she grant this interview cos according to another article she's been hospitalized for breast cancer..

Dmony:
Hmm time shall tell but when did she grant this interview cos according to another article she's been hospitalized for breast cancer..

people grant interviews even on their sick beds....especially in situations like this when you want to clear your name