THE
bits and pieces of the elaborate puzzle of why the nation’s dream of
true deregulation has remained elusive may finally be coming together,
going by the revelations at the sitting of the Joint Committee on
Petroleum Resources (Downstream, Appropriation and Finance), in Abuja.
One
of the intriguing puzzle emerged from the testimony of Austin Oniwon,
Group Managing Director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
According to the NNPC top-shot, the corporation continues to
appropriate 445,000 barrels of the nation’s crude at a time its four
combined refineries could only refine 170,000 barrels – barely a third.
Out of this, Warri refinery takes 80,000 while Port Harcourt could only
refine 90,000 barrels daily.
But
that is not all: of the remaining balance, 150,000 is said to be taken
offshore for refining – split between the Abidjan, Ivory Coast-based
Societe Ivoiriene de Raffinage (SIR) (60,000 barrels), and 90,000
barrels daily swapped with the UK-based Trafigura. Then came the
shocker: the NNPC-GMD could not tell the members of the National
Assembly joint committee what happened to the balance of 60,0000 barrels
daily allocation. Only later in a paid advertisement did the
corporation announce to Nigerians that the variance –said to be the
quantity allocated to the Kaduna refineries known to be out of action
–was sold by the corporation to meet its obligations.
The
image of the NNPC as an opaque, lawless, corrupt and inept corporation
is hardly new. Nigerians are quite familiar with the antics of the
corporation, particularly its records of playing tricks with the destiny
of the nation. But the image of a cheating corporation – selling the
nation’s crude under some dubious arrangement supposedly to offset its
bills, after running the nation’s four refineries aground – would seem a
new low in its unflattering records.
In
the first place, it seems only in the opaque practices of the NNPC would
the act of allocating crude to non-functional refineries be found. Is
the idea to sell in some black market or what? If not, why purchase the
crude in the first place? And, how long has the practice of selling
crude allocated for domestic processing to pay its bills been going on?
Who gave the authority – and is it in the power of the corporation to do
so?
The
nation obviously deserves the benefit of thorough investigations on
these and many more. We are convinced that the National Assembly
committee has only lifted the lid on the extensive shady practices
starring the national oil corporation. The nation deserves the benefit
of a deeper, more penetrating –if need be– forensic probe of how its oil
is traded and by whom. It should not stop at that, we expect the naming
of the culprits and meting of appropriate sanctions on those found to
have soiled their hands.
The
above of course represents a tip of the iceberg in the fraud-ridden
industry that our petroleum industry has become. There can be no
question about it – the NNPC has failed to live to its rationale.
Whether it is on the matter of local content in which the corporation
currently aspires to a measly 10 percent after more than five decades of
oil industry experience, or the question of domestic refining capacity,
the verdict is long out: NNPC as presently constituted is a colossal
disaster. The same obviously applies to the Department of Petroleum
Resources. Can the body claim to have accurate figures on daily lifting
of our oil? Even its capacity to undertake the job is suspect.
This
is why we consider the current investigations by the National Assembly
as important but only to the extent that it leads to the cleansing of
the entire petroleum industry. Anything short of that would amount to a
mere window- dressing.
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