NIGERIA: Nigeria's President Umaru Yar'Adua swears in new cabinet

Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua has finally formed a 32-person cabinet two months after his inauguration as the president of Africa's most populous country. Key positions have been given to members of former president Olusegun Obasanjo's administration and leaders of the ruling People's Democratic Party or PDP. Yar'Adua and the PDP won landslide elections in April that both foreign and domestic observers described as deeply flawed. The new cabinet also includes members of the opposition in keeping with one of Yar'Adua's post-election promises. But Yar'Adua retained the critical energy portfolio like his predecessor. Obasanjo however was not able to resolve the crisis in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta where militants have sworn to continue kidnapping oil workers and sabotage production until the region's people get a greater share of profits. Nigerians are looking to the new cabinet that is dominated by technocrats, to sort out their country's problems with corruption, its oil sector and infrastructure. "For the president to take the post of Minister of Petroleum, I don't look at it as appropriate because there are people who have already been in the field who are knowledgeable, and they know much about petroleum sector, they would have been given this position to hold I think they would do better in that position; but the ministerial appointment in general I think its proper. We know that most of them are technocrats they are knowledgeable people, even though there are pockets of politicians that have found there way into the list I think the whole cabinet is okay and am expecting great things from them," said Sumaila Isiaku who lives in Lagos, the country's commercial capital. 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 the industrialisation of Africa's most populous nation. 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. So the world's eighth-largest exporter of crude relies entirely on imports for its domestic fuel needs. 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. "By handling that ministry I don't think he's going to carry out the reforms he wants, because it goes to show that he doesn't have confidence in the cabinet he has formed in the first place," says Vitus Atama who also lives in Lagos. Most Nigerians have little or no mains electricity and businesses run on costly diesel-fuelled generators.

ITN Source | July 30, 2007

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