ASIDE from a rash of probes by the National Assembly, the most reassuring response to the growing public demand for greater accountability in the management of the country’s oil resources has been the appointment of Nuhu Ribadu to head a special task force on petroleum resources.
Ribadu’s mandate, as read out by the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, is clear – he is to clean up and bring transparency into the cesspit of corruption that the Nigerian oil and gas industry has become.
Most especially, the 21-man Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force will ensure that all the revenues accruable to the country through taxes, royalties and debts are tracked, collected, recovered and remitted to government’s coffers. The Ribadu committee is also asked to develop an automated platform for online validation of income and debt drivers of all parastatals and agencies in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources as well as submit monthly reports for ministerial review and further action. It has been given 60 working days within which to clean up the oil industry.
With presidential approval, the Minister had also invited the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to immediately review all payments made in respect of subsidies on petrol and kerosene and to take all necessary steps to prosecute anybody involved in incidents of malfeasance, fraud, over-invoicing and related illegalities “in an open and transparent manner.” There is also a special task force on governance and controls in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and other parastatals headed by Dotun Sulaiman.
Given the importance of the oil and gas industry as the country’s main revenue earner, it is only natural that a keen interest be taken in goings-on within the upstream and downstream sectors of the industry. This is even more compelling on account of the depth of corruption and sharp practices within the industry as evident in revelations emerging from the recent probes undertaken by the National Assembly. Both arms of the parliament noticed that the country had been short-changed in the administration of the subsidy regime over the years.
It is instructive that the Minister acknowledged that several attempts to reform the oil and gas industry had failed because of vested interests. According to her, “We are very mindful that, over the years, several panels and committees have been set up to reform the petroleum industry and, over the years, many of these efforts have been stalled. The time to break these entrenched interests is now.” Regrettably, the Minister and her key functionaries did not offer to step down to allow the various committees and task forces to “break the entrenched interests” once and for all. This is odd.
Alison-Madueke had argued that the rot in the system had been there before she took over as Minister of Petroleum Resources. That statement is wrong on every count. It should not be forgotten that the coming of the task force, in the first place, is an indictment of the present key players in the oil industry. It means that they have failed to discharge their duties efficiently and diligently. Information so far in the public domain strongly links the Petroleum Resources Ministry, NNPC and its subsidiaries to the “entrenched interests” stalling the sanitisation of the petroleum industry. Besides, until the public outrage over the fuel subsidy removal and the ensuing scandal, the top officials had done nothing to sanitise the rotten system. The Chairman of the House ad hoc Committee on fuel subsidy probe, Farouk Lawan, said, “The management of the subsidy regime was shoddy. It was not transparent. It was messy. It gave a lot of room for abuse.” The Senate is reportedly probing allegations of discretional allocation of oil blocs against industry guidelines by the Petroleum Ministry while the KPMG report that catalogued monumental fraud at the NNPC is a subject of another review.
Nigerians are still reeling from stories of how the N240 billion that was budgeted for subsidies last year, jumped to N1.3 trillion, only for the country to end up losing a whopping N2 trillion for the same purpose. All the main players in the subsidy administration have come up with less than satisfying explanations as to how the N2 trillion figure was arrived at. Was it on 59 million litres of petrol per day claimed to be for planning purpose or the figure of 35million litres per day based on actual consumption? The figures released by Alison-Madueke have conflicted with those of both the NNPC and the Central Bank of Nigeria, which is the final paying authority.
These findings are disturbing. Many companies that should have little or nothing to do with the oil industry benefited from the subsidy largesse while, in other cases, there were no documented evidence that supplies were carried out before beneficiaries were paid. How about the controversial payment of subsidy on kerosene? The House probe revealed that the process used in awarding contracts to importers actually became a bazaar with a lot of manipulations and sharp practices attending the whole process.
The outrageous circumstances surrounding fuel subsidy payment must be unravelled; but not much can be achieved without some principal players, especially the Minister and the GMD that have been mentioned in the revelations at the probes, stepping aside. It is true that the Minister and the GMD have never been accused of direct involvement in illegality, but it is against the principles of natural justice for them to probe their own affairs. As far as the probes go, both the Minister and the GMD are also in the dock.
If indeed Ribadu and his team are expected to clean up the industry and right the wrongs, it is difficult to see how they can be achieved with those key officials breathing down their necks. Therefore, for Ribadu and his colleagues to discharge their mandate creditably, without Nigerians dismissing the whole affair as another exercise in futility, President Goodluck Jonathan should, of necessity, ask Alison-Madueke, Austin Oniwon, and all the other key players that have failed to manage the industry effectively, to step down for the duration of the 60 days that the task force has been given to complete its assignment. A basic principle of natural justice is that a man shall not be a judge in his own case.
