“In the world Nigeria’s corruption is worse no accountability at all” – Emir Sanisi

The Emir of Kano, who is a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, reveals that the country lost about $1bn (N197bn) monthly under Jonathan’s tenure.

During a programme titled ‘How a cancer of corruption steals Nigerian oil, weapons and lives’, an American daily evening television show, Sanusi also said many shady agreements occurred under the former oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke, who is being investigated in the United Kingdom.

Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, said: “In Nigeria, there is no accountability at all and that is why I think Nigeria’s corruption is worse than corruption in most parts of the world. It is the worst type of corruption. It’s stealing.

“Frankly, I think a billion dollars under Jonathan a month was about what we were losing.”

The monarch supposed that during Diezani’s tenure as minister, people paid as little as $50m for admission to crude oil blocs valued at over $2bn.

The Emir of Kano, clarifying how some of the shady contracts took place, added: “Basically, all it does is allow a group of people, who themselves don’t have any kind of operating background, to pay $50m for access to the crude oil in blocs, valued at over $2bn and they just take the crude oil, ship it out and don’t return the money and there is no trace of where the money has gone.

“Someone gets a contract to lift crude from the terminals to the refineries and in between, that crude is stolen; it is stolen on the high sea.”

Sanusi added that if the former oil minister was found guilty by a UK court, it would serve as a warning to other corrupt people.

“If she goes to court and is jailed for example, it sends a signal; I think that there is a day of reckoning,” former CBN governor stated.

The US television show cited United States and UK authorities as saying that Diezani might have “personally overseen the stealing of $6bn. The most common method is awarding oil contracts to companies owned by friends.”

It supposed that the second most common method of stealing oil was to make oil vessels disappear mysteriously.

Sanusi was fired by the former president in February last year for alleging that $20bn was missing from the account of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.

A fresh war of words recently broken out between Diezani and the Emir of Kano over the supposed disappearance of $20 billion under ex-president Goodluck Jonathan.