By Toyin Akinosho,
In the Christmas of 2014, Nigeria had three months to go for elections.
I was living in Lagos, the country’s commercial hub, and frantically calling for the removal of Diezani Allison-Madueke as the petroleum minister.
There were numerous reasons I thought it’d be a value destroying proposition to keep Mrs. Allison-Madueke in the role, if (the incumbent President) Goodluck Jonathan won the elections. I enumerated them in this column at the time.
But close to eight years after the electoral sack of Goodluck Jonathan and the accompanying exit of Allison-Madueke, the Nigerian petroleum industry is in a far sorrier state than it was. President Muhammadu Buhari and his team have not only wasted the Nigerian energy crisis, they have encouraged the ungovernability of the space that the petroleum sector occupies, even with their much-celebrated success with the passage of the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA).
For context, I’d briefly summarise why I had forcefully called for Diezani’s ouster before I go to discuss aspects of Buhari’s dismal performance.
The darkest spot on Diezani’s tenure was…