The lid was this morning lifted on one of Nigeria’s best kept secrets: How the country’s successive presidents spend crude oil revenues at will and without accounting to anyone.

A former insider at the Aso Rock Presidential Villa in Abuja said that all it takes for a sitting President to get any amount he wants from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is to summon the corporation’s Group Managing Director (GMD) and ask him to go and bring the needed sum.

According to Olusegun Adeniyi, who functioned as Special Adviser on Communications to late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, “If there is crisis in any state of the federation and there is need to mobilize resources for security agencies, the next thing you hear from whoever is the president of Nigeria is ‘call me the GMD’. If a leader of one of the ECOWAS countries visited and was genuflecting before our president about how rough things were for his country (and may be later behind closed doors, for himself), the instant instruction would be, ‘call me the GMD’. And I am aware that for several years (may be even now), the activities of the military Joint Task Force (JTF) were solely funded by the NNPC.”

Mr. Adeniyi, who made the disclosure in ‘The Verdict’, his weekly column in ThisDay newspaper, said that “the problem of the NNPC predates President Jonathan though most critical observers believe that things have in recent time gone haywire.”

As he sees it, “Given such a situation, how would the Federation Account that is essentially dependent on oil revenues but is jointly owned by the federal government, states and local governments balance?”

News Express will shortly publish Mr. Adeniyi’s article entitled ‘Sanusi’s Letter, Jonathan’s Burden?’ which dwells on the September 25, 2013 letter written by Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, to President Goodluck Jonathan, alleging failure by the NNPC to remit to the Federation Account billions of dollars worth of oil revenue realised within a period of 19 months between January 2012 and July 2013.