Amid the ongoing statement by Aliko Dangote on the education financing of Farouk Ahmed’s children, the outgoing Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA), dismissed allegations that he spent about $5 million on his children’s education abroad, insisting that his income, scholarships and family support fully account for the expenses.
In a statement, Ahmed invited anti-graft agencies to investigate his finances, while stating that the claims were misleading and ignored his more than three decades of service in Nigeria’s petroleum sector.
He said he earns about N48 million yearly as NMDPRA chief executive, an amount he noted is publicly available in the agency’s audited reports.
Ahmed traced his career back to 1991, when he joined the then Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) through a competitive civil service examination, emphasising that his rise from a junior engineer to chief executive was based on merit rather than political patronage.
He said he worked across key technical divisions, including crude oil marketing, gas supply monitoring and downstream operations, and rose to General Manager of the Crude Oil Marketing Division by 2012, overseeing the country’s critical revenue stream during a volatile period in the global oil market.
According to him, his appointment as NMDPRA chief executive in 2021 came with a mandate to implement the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) transparently and without favour, a task he said inevitably created opposition from interests accustomed to regulatory opacity.
He argued that recent allegations against him coincided with stricter enforcement actions by the authority, including tighter licensing requirements, quality control measures and transparent pricing mechanisms.
On the education of his children, Ahmed said three of his four children benefited from merit-based scholarships covering between 40 and 65 per cent of tuition, while additional support came from an education foundation established by his late father for his grandchildren before his death in 2018.
He added that his own contribution was drawn from savings accumulated over decades of federal service, cooperative investments available to civil servants and family resources.
He maintained that the cost of his children’s education was consistent with his earnings and did not involve corruption or living beyond his means.
Ahmed said he had submitted asset declarations to the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) every year since entering public service and that all his income sources and major expenditures were documented.
The NMDPRA chief further authorised educational institutions attended by his children to release financial records to authorised Nigerian investigators, expressing confidence that such disclosures would disprove the allegations.
He also rejected claims that recent import licensing approvals amounted to economic sabotage, saying the PIA mandated the authority to ensure supply security and prevent scarcity whenever domestic supply is insufficient.
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