Former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Prof. Kingsley Moghalu, has called for the scrapping of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
Moghalu stated this while delivering a lecture titled “Overcoming Poverty: The Secret of the Wealth of Nations” on Wednesday in Lagos at the 3rd Annual Lecture of the Centre for Financial Journalism (CFJ).
According to him, the scrapping of the NNPC by the Federal Government will bring sanity to the petroleum sector.
The financial expert said that the NNPC would be more effective if it was run as a Public Private Partnership (PPP).
He also said that deregulation of the downstream petroleum sector was the way to go to stop the incessant fuel scarcity in the country.
The don said that for the country to overcome poverty, it needed to have a worldview, an economic philosophy and be innovative, be economically competitive and should be ready to build sound institutions.
Moghalu urged the Federal Government to avoid further borrowing to prevent the mortgaging of the future of the nation’s youths.
Earlier, the chairman of the occasion, Senator Olabiyi Durojaiye, Chairman, Board of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), noted that the title of the lecture was a reminder of Adam Smith’s book written in the 18th centuries.
Durojaiye commended the present administration in building on the successes recorded by his predecessors in the agricultural sector in turning around the fortune of the economy.
He called on the smugglers of rice to stop their unpatriotic trade by allowing the efforts of government to attain fruition.
The event attracted the high and mighty in the media industry.
