Who will Tame NNPC?
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation is always in the news for all the wrong reasons. Corruption allegations against the current leadership of this corporation pour daily. The NNPC under Maikanti Baru has become an outlaw and bigger than virtually everybody in Nigeria. It persistently refuses to make correct remittances to the Federation Account for crude oil sold, yet, nobody queries this monster. Its recalcitrance stalled the last FAAC meeting for the distribution of May revenue because its remittance was less N20 billion, without any plausible explanation.
It was also observed at the FAAC meeting that “NNPC claimed it spent N3.5 billion on product leakages and pipeline vandalism, but the Department of Petroleum Resources, an agency that is supposed to keep such record, claimed ignorance of the amount”. Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun remarked: “We operate the NNPC as a business. We have invested public capital in that business; and we have expectations of return. And when that return falls lower than our expectations, then the owners of this business, which in this case are the Federal Government and states, need to act…We felt that some of the costs couldn’t be justified.”
Sleaze allegations against the NNPC under this “change” government are unending. What about Governor Abdulaziz Yari’s yet to be addressed allegation of subsidy fraud by the corporation? The methodology of Baru’s subsidy payment is impervious. The Zamfara State governor also rejected the corporation’s bizarre claim of 60-65 million litres national daily consumption of petrol. Till date, those who should query NNPC have refused to do so.
The memo written by the junior Minister for Petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu, on sleaze in the NNPC remains fresh in our memory. Contracts running into billions of USD were allegedly awarded exclusively by Baru, without due process. Some of them included the crude term contracts valued at over $10 billion; DSDP contracts valued at over $5 billion; the AKK pipeline contract valued at approximately $3 billion; various financing allocation-funding contracts with the NOCs valued at over $3 billion and various NPDC production service contracts valued at over $3 billion. Kachikwu further alleged that during the first one year of Baru’s tenure, no contract was cleared by the NNPC board, despite legal and procedural requirements that all contracts above $20 million would need to be reviewed and approved by the board.
Who will curb this monster called NNPC in the interest of Nigerians? We may have to wait for another leader.