President Umaru Yar'Adua has appointed his Vice President Jonathan Goodluck, to head the newly constituted board of the country's privatisation agency, officials said Wednesday. Yar'Adua charged the new board to be transparent in its dealings. "There are lots of challenges which you have to face up to, not least of which is imbuing the process with credibility," Yar'Adua told the board at its inauguration in Abuja.

The president said his deputy and the other members of the National Council on Privatisation (NCP) should gain confidence of the investing public by making privatisation process credible. The NCP is the body empowered by law to formulate policies for the privatisation of public agencies and businesses. Some of the government agencies privatised in the past, particularly in the dying days of the former President Olusegun Obasanjo's administration, drew condemnations from the public who suspected the process as skewed to favour cronies of the ex-president. The selling of the Kaduna and Port Harcourt refineries to a firm owned by Aliko Dangote and Femi Otedola, both known allies of Obasanjo on the eve of his departure from power on May 29 formed part of the grouse of labour unions in their nationwide crippling strike in June. The sales were later reversed by the Yar'Adua administration.