AS the leadership crisis at the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) took a new twist yesterday, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN), has vehemently rejected the appointment of Mrs. Sotonye Iyoyo, as the Acting Executive Secretary of the foremost regulatory agency in the oil and gas sector, insisting she is an ‘outsider’ from the Port Harcourt Refinery and Petrochemical Limited.
The union on Wednesday said rather than appoint Iyoyo, the Federal Government should allow Mr. Moses Mbaba, who is the General Manager, Administration and Human Resources to act as PPPRA boss to allow for smooth succession.
Chairman of PENGASSAN, PPPRA chapter, Victor Ononokpono, said it would be healthy for the regulatory agency if the most senior official (Mbaba) is allowed to take over in line with civil service rules. He expressed concern that in less than one week, PPPRA was having about two acting Executive Secretaries in controversial circumstances, pointing out that such a sensitive agency should be insulated from any form of partisan politics.
According to sources, Mbaba’s predicament springs from his alleged affiliation with former President Goodluck Jonathan, a development that makes him a “bad product” in the Buhari administration, irrespective of his competence.
But PENGASSAN believes Mbaba will hit the ground running since he is more likely to understand the intricacies of running a vital agency like PPPRA, instead of bringing in an outsider that will spend some time learning the ropes and retarding the operational momentum of the agency. It was against this background that the union members decided to lock up the complex, insisting that activities of the agency remain suspended until government does the right thing by maintaining its earlier directives that the sacked chief executives of its agencies and departments should hand over to the most senior person, which the former ES, Farouk Ahmed, did last week, even as it urged the government to remove Iyoyo.
Ononokpono insists the appointment of an operator or marketer to head a regulatory agency like PPPRA and what it represents in the industry has for the past years scuttled and frustrated the smooth functioning of the agency.
“The effects of the continued deployment of either a staff from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) or Petroleum Pipelines and Product Marketing Company (PPMC) to head the PPPRA, which has become the norm in the past years has brought about stagnancy that was not expected of the agency.
“PPPRA is the regulator of the operations and all the businesses in the industry, but tell me how an appointee or the head of PPPRA, a staff of these two government outfits, would have the clout to regulate the operations or businesses in the sector under the headship of his master,” he asked.
0 comments :
Post a Comment