Nigeria appoints new head of NNPC to crack down on corruption

Nigeria’s president has made good on his promise to reform the energy sector with key appointments already announced, but the legislative workload ahead is daunting

Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari has named a Harvard-educated lawyer as head of the notoriously corrupt state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Industry experts saw it as proof of Buhari’s determination to crack down on corruption and mismanagement in the country’s oil sector. As oil minister in the 1970s, Buhari saw the birth of the behemoth. Now, as democratically-elected president, he is determined to drive out the graft within the oil industry, and restructure the 24,000-employee NNPC. During the election campaign he vowed to clean up the oil sector and the NNPC. He has also pledged to locate the billions of dollars in oil revenues that went missing from government coffe