65m Questions for Baru
The All Progressives Congress (APC) kicked up a storm about transparency and accountability during the electioneering and immediately President Muhammadu Buhari was inaugurated. Indeed, the government tagged nearly everyone who had held office in the last administration corrupt. It was the selling narrative and I must confess, it was appealing and convenient to the charge. With a believing public (or should I say a gullible public), it was easily a home run. It’s been three years since this government took over the reins of power, yet corruption has become even more pervasive despite all the noise of purportedly fighting the hydra-head monster, at least going by the Transparency International and US Country reports released recently.
While this government pretends that things have improved on all fronts, the evidence points to the contrary. I can clearly see that those who are basking in the sunshine of recovering looted funds and naming and shaming the looters will be called to account after this government leaves power. Too much sleaze is going on now not to warrant any inquisition. We may have to contend with the APC loot in the not-too-distant future just as we are contending with PDP’s today. I can see this clearly going by the level of impunity and the large-scale mismanagement of public resources going on today. All those who are hounding people into prison would themselves be escorted to jail in cold metal cuffs. Even those parading the landscape as political godfathers may end up as guests of federal penitentiaries.
Only recently, the Chairman of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) and Zamfara State governor, Abdulaziz Yari, accused the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) of subsidy malfeasance and rejected the corporation’s outlandish claim of 60-65 million litres national daily consumption of petrol. The NNPC had blamed the “porous” borders for the humongous volume it claimed was being smuggled out of the country.
Interestingly, Yari made the accusation after a meeting of the NGF with Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo at the State House. Osinbajo you would recall has been all over town talking about corruption and the looting of the national treasury by the last government. I don’t know if Yari complained to him about his observation. If not, I suspect he must have seen Yari’s statement in the media. If he didn’t, then, I am drawing his attention to it. A man like him who professes to be fighting corruption cannot ignore the gravity of Yari’s complaint. Billions of dollars is being stolen daily right under Buhari/Osinbajo’s noses.
If they were genuine about their crusade of sanitising the system, or reforming it to avoid a repeat of what they condemned in the previous government, then they would have given attention to this even more, than what happened under Jonathan. I can assure Osinbajo that he would not have peaceful sleep until the EFCC probes this massive loss of public revenue. We cannot close our eyes to the massive looting going on now disguised as smuggling.
This government promised us reforms, especially in the NNPC and embarked on what has turned out to be a whitewash. Yari’s recent expose of the massive discrepancies in NNPC’s claim has further reinforced our belief that the more this government shouts about change, the more things stay the same, or even get worse. According to Yari, “When there was no cost recovery, the NNPC clearly gave us the number of 33 and 35 million litres per day as the consumption of Nigeria. But now, with the new regime of cost recovery, NNPC is claiming a daily consumption of 60 and 65 million litres per day, which we rejected and said no. So many of our international partners are saying that even if we are feeding Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana and Niger, we cannot consume more than 35 million litres per day. So, we are wondering where the 60 million litres is coming from. We are trying to sort that one out, that one is not yet resolved.”
Therefrom, please try to compute what is being stolen on a daily basis under Baru in the name of smuggling. The figures are staggering. I recall that in 2015, the then Group Managing Director of NNPC, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu at a media parley with some senior journalists at George Hotel, Ikoyi disputed the 35 million litres daily consumption inherited from the last government, saying that their investigation found the daily consumption figure was far less. He urged the gathering to query where the excess was going to and who the beneficiaries were. Three years after, the 30-35 million figures Kachikwu disputed (he put the realistic national consumption figure at 23-25 million litres at the time) have suddenly jumped to 60-65 million daily under his successor Dr. Maikanti Baru. How can that be?
Let us look at it more closely to understand the scale of what is going on: Under Jonathan, Nigeria’s daily consumption was said to be in the region of 30-35 million litres, Nigeria’s economy was among the three fastest-growing economies in the world, third to be precise. The economy grew at an impressive rate of about 7.5 per cent per annum. In contrast, the Nigerian economy grew at 1.9 per cent in the first quarter of 2018. The question we should all ask Baru is how come Nigeria’s daily consumption has jumped to 60-65 million litres when the purchasing power of the average Nigerian is at an all-time low, due to the prevailing economic situation? Does this make sense?
What are the factors driving such an extraordinary increase in consumption in an economy that only recently emerged from recession? Well, Baru blamed it all on smuggling. How strange, when Buhari only recently commended the comptroller general of customs, Hameed Ali, for doing a fantastic job of reducing the incidence of smuggling through the borders? Please note that the government did not credit the staggering increase on widespread “economic prosperity” as a result of its economic policies. Instead, it is blamed on smuggling. Is it not curious that despite the humongous volume of petrol that is purportedly smuggled out of the country daily, no one has been arrested by the customs or DSS? If no one has been arrested, is it not safe to say that there is widespread complicity going all the way to the very top? At least this was the logic given by Adams Oshiomhole in his heyday as a labour leader.
Let me further state here that the sizes of the economies of our neighbouring countries make it abundantly improbable for them to absorb such huge volumes of smuggled fuel. Even more preposterous and vexatious is that their purchasing power and their combined populations of just a little over 100 million make the argument more unlikely. How come these countries, besides their individual official fuel imports arrangements, are still able to absorb 30-35 million litres of fuel smuggled from Nigeria everyday?
Baru’s justification for such staggering volume losses – that the petrol price differentials between Nigeria and neighbouring countries in the West African region makes it attractive for smugglers to use the frontier filling stations to siphon petroleum products across the borders – is therefore hollow, pathetic, pitiful and fails spectacularly to make logical economic sense, because those filing stations have always been there. The implication of that massive increase in “smuggling” through our land borders is that Nigeria is losing hundreds of millions of dollars daily.
In March, Baru, told a bewildered nation that he had spent an alarming $5.8 billion importing petrol in just two months. Baru’s out-of-control spending binge is frightening. Going by that figure, Baru would spend about $34.8 billion per annum on fuel imports. Is that not crazy? Which nation can survive this way? Yet, Baru is accountable to no one.
Particularly instructive, going by Yari’s statement, is that this massive increase in daily consumption started when the NNPC reintroduced the payment of subsidies under the new banner name called “under-recoveries”. The name change from subsidy to under-recovery was actually designed to hide the fact that the APC-led government, which was the arrowhead of the vociferous attacks that trailed subsidy payments under the last government, has itself been caught in the same mess. So, the use of the phrase “under-recovery” or whatever is simply meant to fool the public that it is not in the subsidy racket!