Mr. Remi Babalola served as Minister of State for Finance and Minister of Special Duties in the Goodluck Jonathan administration.
He was redeployed from the Ministry of Finance to the Ministry of Special Duties for raising the alarm that the NNPC was bankrupt.
A statement from the federal government at the time immediately denied that the NNPC was in dire straits through the Minister of Finance, Olusegun Aganga.
Babalola was said to have resigned from Jonathan’s cabinet on “health grounds” in September 2010.
Goodluck Jonathan, in response to Mr Babalola’s letter of resignation, wished him “full recovery and a speedy return to an active life”.
Delivering a paper presented at the 45th Annual Accountants Conference and 50th Anniversary celebration of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria on Tuesday, September 1 (today), Babalola said he had to take a walk from Jonathan’s team because the level of corruption and kleptocracy therein had reached unbearable heights.
“Our culture of impunity is the bane of the entrenched corruption in our society. The value destruction and corruption undermine any economic development or social change we may aspire for our nation”, he said, while urging President Muhammadu Buhari to confront the corruption malaise head-on.
“Mismanagement and misallocation of resources, coupled with an unprecedented level of corruption have been at their highest in the history of our nation in the last six years.
“Performance or success in public space was measured by the conversion rate of public funds into private accounts. It looks as if democracy has been substituted with kleptocracy.”
He recalled drawing the attention of the nation to the parlous state of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation’s (NNPC) accounts five years ago. He said friends and family feared for his life because calling the NNPC out at the time amounted to “stepping on a snake”.
“I was unperturbed and unruffled but ready and willing to take a walk as a statement of intent that if they wanted to continue in that decadence of resource mismanagement, I was not going to be a part of it.”
Babalola decried the forced exit of erstwhile CBN Governor Lamido Sanusi for blowing the whistle on the NNPC.
“Such has been our contempt for process transparency that an incumbent governor of an operationally and legally independent central bank, who publicly alerted the nation, was forced out of a fixed tenure.
“Of course given its systemic importance to the economy, there is no justification for the state-owned oil sector monopoly (the NNPC) not to publicly publish its audited accounts and even quarterly accounts like all listed companies on the stock exchange,” he said.
Babalola is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria. He served in the Ministry of Finance from July 2007 following his appointment by late President, Umaru Yar’Adua.
A banker until his appointment, Mr Babalola was an Executive Director of First Bank of Nigeria Plc. He was in charge of Lagos and West business, as well as consumer banking and electronic payments.
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