The governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el Rufai, has said Nigeria must
do away with its “corrupt” oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum
Corporation, NNPC, or stand the risk of itself being destroyed.
“If
you don’t kill the NNPC, it will kill Nigeria,” Mr. el-Rufai said
Monday at the 7th Wole Soyinka Centre Media Lecture Series in Abuja,
where he was a guest speaker.
Mr. El-Rufai said the NNPC
has become so entrenched in corruption that the only way out for Nigeria
is not to attempt to salvage the corporation, but to destroy it and
create a new oil company.He said he hoped President Muhammadu Buhari will implement that proposal.
The
governor said as a former director general of the Bureau of Public
Enterprises, he was confident a messy organisation could be disbanded
and turned into a useful one.
He said NNPC has become so corrupt
and arrogant that it runs a parallel government and unilaterally decides
what it remits to a nation of 170 million people, while its hundreds of
employees feed fat on Nigeria’s resources.
In the last three
years, Mr. el-Rufai said the NNPC retained 42 per cent of Nigeria’s
money, and remitted only 58 per cent.“About N971bn was budgeted for
subsidy payments in 2014 alone (more than twice that was eventually
paid). You all recall how trillions of naira were paid out as oil
subsidy in 2011, when only N254bn was appropriated. No one has been
successfully prosecuted for this scam. Huge deficits in gas supply have
ensured that the country’s thermal plants cannot produce power at
optimal levels,” he said.
“The long and short of the situation
of our oil industry is best exemplified by the parallel government
called the NNPC. In 2012, it sold N2.77tn of ‘domestic’ crude oil but
paid only N1.66tn to the Federation Account. In 2013, it earned N2.66tn
but paid N1.56tn to FAAC; in 2014, (it earned) N2.64tn, but remitted
N1.44tn; while between January and May 2015, it earned N733.36bn and
remitted only N473.2bn.
“That means that the NNPC only remitted
about 58 per cent of the monies earned between 2012 and the first half
of 2015. A company with the audacity to retain 42 per cent of a
country’s money has become a veritable parallel republic!”
He
said the examples he gave were only with respect to domestic crude oil
sale. “Similar leakages exist in the NPDC, NAPIMS procurement and
subsidiary budgets,” he said.
“The NNPC feels entitled to consume
more resources than the 36 states, the FCT & Federal Government
combined. How could a country so dependent on oil revenues have been so
lax about the proper gover-
nance, efficiency and security of its oil industry?” he lamented.
He
identified the need to remove the undue premium on public ownership and
control of every major oil asset, while checking the impact of
corruption and distortion of oil subsidy on the country’s economy, and
restructuring of the NNPC in the national interest.
To
realise the potentials of the oil industry, he said the government must
not only define exactly what the country wants the oil industry to be
and to achieve, but also the structure that would best deliver it.
“An
efficient and productive oil sector, able to create jobs, spur
industrialization and earn more revenues requires that we tackle the
monster that the NNPC has become,” he said. “We should replace the NNPC
with brand new organizations that are fit for purpose – a commercialized
and corporatized national oil company and new industry regulators.
He
said the new national oil company should be capitalized once and for
all, and then freed to fend for itself like other national oil
companies, by seeking its financing independently from the financial
markets and paying due taxes and royalties.
“An
efficient and productive oil sector, able to create jobs, spur
industrialisation and earn more revenues, requires that we tackle the
monster that the NNPC has become.
This
country can no longer afford to maintain an NNPC that arrogantly,
unlawfully & unconstitutionally spends an unhealthy proportion of
national oil earnings on itself,” he said.
“We
should replace the NNPC with brand new organisations that are fit for
purpose, among others, a commercialised & corporatised national oil
company, and new industry regulators.This new national oil company
should be capitalised once and for all, and then freed to fend for
itself like other national oil companies do, seeking its financing
independently from the financial markets and paying due taxes and
royalties.
He said no one
qualified more to appreciate the rot in the NNPC, and to deal with the
menace, than President Buhari who was the pioneer head of the NNPC in
1977.“No one can appreciate the gap between the vision of the NNPC’s
founding fathers, the beautiful baby of 1977 and the 38 year-old monster
it has become better than President Buhari.
The NNPC
of today must make Chief Sunday Awoniyi of blessed memory squirm in his
grave. Something fundamentally decisive must be done to tame this
monster,” Mr. el-Rufai said.
Mr. el-Rufai lamented the irony
of about 70 million, or 40% of Nigeria’s total population, currently
living below the poverty line, despite the country’s earning of at least
$1trillion from oil in the last 50 years.
“For
our vast masses, oil is no fortune,” Mr. El Rufai said. “It is more of a
mirage, but a more insidious kind, because the fortune is visible in
the lifestyles of a few thousands of the privileged elite, but is
stubbornly inaccessible to tens of millions of ordinary people.
“Our
rich enjoy the lifestyles of the richest in the world, while our poor
are truly the wretched of the earth. This inequality is most
unfortunate.”
To avoid sinking deeper into poverty,
Mr. El-Rufai said the country must resolve to spend wiser, and do more
with less by changing its big appetite to consume rather than save;
import, rather than produce domestically, or neglect to prioritize
capital investments.
The major responsibility of a democratic
government, he said, was to ensure that people were moved away from
pain of extreme poverty, by managing the country’s resources in a way
that would sustain building the people, through diligent revenue
collection and cost-effective and resulted –oriented application.
Source:- Premiumtimesng
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