Dan Aibangbe
IN recent times, the media has been awash with the story surrounding the ‘ smoking gun’ found in the cool of the centrally air- conditioned high offices of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC. The proverbial smoking gun in this case, is the purportedly unremitted 19.25 billion USD revenue from crude oil sales made way back in Y2014. That is about seven years down the lane!
At the initial time, the prevailing dollar exchange rate of 168 naira gave the resulting figure of about 3.24 trillion naira. In today’s terms, at a worsened official rate of 380 naira to a dollar, the revised figure would come to 7.315 trillion naira. This amount would conveniently finance a whooping fifty percent of the highly ambitious and expansionary national budget of Y2021.
The monstrosity of this figure would ordinarily explain the aggressive tenacity with which the House of Representatives’ Public Accounts Committee is seemingly pursuing the inquiry. It is pertinent to state here that this matter has been dragging since the 7th National Assembly, four GMDS ago and three Auditors- General down the line.
When this trajectory is put into proper perspective, one cannot but despair at the charade going on. The pertinent question is: how serious or effective is the National Assembly’s over- sight function, regardless of the barking? There have been similar cases of serious national questions being asked at either or both the Senate and the House of Reps about the failure of leadership surrounding the nation’s security ecosystem, for instance. At a point, the House made ( what appears to many concerned Nigerians) very feeble attempts at holding the President accountable for the unpalatable security situation in the country. Many suggested that the poor results were the outcomes of incapacity, or fatigue ( not the Military clothing) or overstaying of the Service Chiefs’ incumbents, whom he had retained against public opinion.
This phenomenon supports the suggestion in some quarters that the oversight arm of government simply carries out its responsibilities