Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola has blamed the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for the death, Tuesday night in an oil tanker-induced inferno, of hapless Nigerians in the Apapa area of the state. The death toll in that fire disaster has been variously put at anything from 15 to over 52, in addition to the loss of property worth billions of naira.

An anguished Fashola yesterday lashed out at the NNPC, accusing it of a culture of waste and corruption. He said that if the money realised from oil were judiciously used, those who died in the Apapa blaze and other parts of the country wouldn’t have died. He spoke after inspecting the Igbogbo Housing Estate, the rehabilitation of Awolowo Road in Ikorodu and some other ongoing projects.

Baring his mind on the unaccounted oil revenue, the Lagos Governor said: “When one looks at the waste in the NNPC, now we are talking about the $45 billion that was missing. They seem to be quite satisfied to tell us that it was only $10 billion that was missing, that was a lot of money. One dollar of public money is a lot of money.

“But later they told us that they spent the money actually. Now serious questions must be asked by the National Assembly, ICAN (Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria) and Nigerians that who appropriated the money? Was it spent during the period that the CBN governor said that they didn’t account for the money or was it before? And if there was appropriation for it, then we can now begin to seriously talk that were they the right places to spend the money?”

Declaring that these are “serious questions that we all must ask at this moment,” Fashola regretted that Nigeria, despite huge oil revenues, is one of the few oil producing nations in the world still transporting fuel with trucks through the cities due to massive corruption that diverts funds which should have been used for development into public pockets.

•Photo shows Governor Fashola.