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Yar'Adua sacks top aide
20/02/2008 07:23 - (SA)
Abuja - Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua has sacked his senior aide in charge of power sector reforms, Foluseke Somolu, for disputing presidential claims over past spending on power sector.
"I can confirm that Mr Somolu has been sacked by the president," Yar'Adua's spokesperson Olusegun Adeniyi said on Tuesday, without giving a formal cause of dismissal.
A top energy ministry official said Somulu, a senior special assistant to the president on power sector reform, was the outcome of an "act of insubordination to the president".
Last January, Yar'Adua told a visiting top official of the World Bank that "more than $10bn had been invested in the (electricity) power sector between 2000 and 2007 without much result".
However, Somulu disputed this figure and stated that the total investment in electric power generation during the eight-year tenure of former president Olusegun Obasanjo was not more than $5.16bn, said officials.
Adeniyi said: "The president invited him to show him the relevant document and even discovered that the correct figure is about $13bn and not $10bn."
On being elected to power in May 2007, Yar'Adua government pledged a state of emergency in the power supply sector, but nothing concrete had been done in nearly nine months, and an electricity crisis was biting hard, particularly for small and medium-sized companies.
On Tuesday, speaking on behalf of 19 northern state parliaments in Nigeria, a country of 140 million people, the parliamentary speaker from Kwara State urged Yar'Adua to take swift measures, declaring that the textile industry was particularly hard hit.
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