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Nigeria's new President Umaru Yar'Adua will head the country's Ministry of Energy, it was announced today, in a move that places direct control of the country's industry in his hands.
Nigeria's new President Umaru Yar'Adua will head the country's Ministry of Energy, it was announced today, in a move that places direct control of the country's industry in his hands.
Yar'Adua, who appointed his first Cabinet today, two months after taking office, named Odein Ajumogobia, a commercial lawyer, as his junior minister for energy responsible for petroleum.
"The president is the full minister in charge of energy," Reuters quoted presidential spokesman Segun Adeniyi as saying.
Ajumogobia will likely act as the top oil official in Africa's largest producer and head its Opec delegation.
Yar'Adua has said he would declare a state of emergency in power and energy, promising to funnel better brains and more cash into the sector to accelerate Nigeria's industrialisation.
"We cannot begin to address, in a fundamental manner, the problems of the economy, until we successfully tackle the power and energy issue," said Yar'Adua last month.
The sector is in a shambles. None of Nigeria's four oil refineries is working because of a combination of technical problems, sabotage and mismanagement.
There are chronic fuel shortages which lead to massive queues at filling stations, price gouging by marketers, rampant theft of fuel from pipelines and a hazardous black market.
Despite having the world's seventh-largest natural gas reserves, Nigeria burns off much of its gas as a waste product, causing pollution. Several projects are now under construction to harness these resources, but they are mostly for export as liquefied natural gas.
"I am more interested in how much gas we can tap for domestic use than what we can get for export," Yar'Adua said last month.
Nigerian oil and gas production is rising thanks to big new offshore oilfields and LNG projects developed by Western multinationals. But growth has been severely disrupted by violence in the main producing region in the Niger Delta.
Since taking office two months ago, Yar'Adua has moved quickly to engage delta militants in talks, but a wave of kidnapping and armed robbery continues.
Oil exports provide more than 90% of Nigeria's hard currency earnings. High revenues over the past five years have helped the country stabilise its exchange rate, boost foreign reserves and stimulate economic growth.
Harvard Law School graduate Ajumogobia is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, a top legal title, and has decades of experience as a commercial lawyer in litigation and arbitration.
He was proposed as a minister by Rivers state, the country's top oil producing state, where he serves as the state government's commissioner of justice, a Reuters report said.