The chairman of the Dangote Industries Limited (DIL), Aliko Dangote has accused the chief executive officer of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) Farouk Ahmed of “paying $5 million” to Swiss secondary schools for his children.
Dangote made the accusation while speaking during a news conference at Dangote Petroleum Refinery on Sunday, accusing the NMDPRA executive of corruption and economic sabotage.
The billionaire said Ahmed paid the said amount for four of his children, covering a period of six years.
Although Dangote did not mention the name of the Swiss schools, he said the authority’s CEO was living above his means, calling on the federal government to investigate.
The group president said such expenditure raises serious questions about potential conflicts of interest and the integrity of regulatory oversight in the downstream petroleum sector.
“I’ve had people actually complaining about a regulator who put his children in secondary school, and that secondary school education, which is six years, four of them cost Nigeria $5 million,” Dangote said.
“My children went to a Nigerian secondary school. They didn’t go outside Nigeria to attend secondary school.
“… I don’t know why the authority chief executive, Mallam Farouk, has four of his children that he educated in Switzerland at the cost of $5 million for their secondary school education alone, not university.
“And I know that one of them just finished Harvard. So, I want to see what kind of system we are operating that people are now busy destroying a country, taking money from the government, because his income does not match paying this kind of fees.”
The billionaire said the NMDPRA chief should be given a chance to clear his name by being investigated and not sacked.
Dangote said the law should be allowed to take its course, but threatened to take legal steps against the school to ensure the disclosure of Ahmed’s payment, if he denies the allegation.
“The Code of Conduct Bureau, or any other body deemed appropriate by the government, can investigate the matter. Let them see whether his income matches the five million he has paid [as] school fees for six years for four of his children, this is without tickets,” he said.
“He doesn’t need to be sacked. But let him clear that he has not compromised his various positions in government at the cost of Nigerians, when a lot of people in Sokoto can’t even go to school because of 100,000 naira.”
“If he denies it, I will not only publish what he paid as tuition in those secondary schools, I will sue those schools to publish how much of the fees he has paid for all the time that they were there, including the other information which we don’t have. He should give us the universities they went to and spent four years. How much he has paid.”
