From Ndubuisi Orji and Okey Sampson
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Governors’ Forum has alleged President Muhammadu Buhari’s headship of the Ministry of Petroleum is responsible for revenue leakages in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
Consequently, the PDP governors called for the immediate separation of the office of the president from that of the minister of petroleum.
The forum, in a communiqué read by its chairman, Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State, after its meeting in Aba, Abia State, yesterday, also called for an audit of daily Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) consumption, so as to determine the actual cost incurred on fuel subsidy.
The governors vowed to resist any further attempt by NNPC to ascribe unsubstantiated subsidy claims to other tiers of government.
“NNPC deducts N8.33 billion monthly for the rehabilitation of the refineries. Till date, no refinery is working.
“On priority projects of the nation’s oil industry, NNPC deducted N788.78 billion for various investments between 2018 and 2021 without recourse to Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC).
“NNPC in 2021 alone claimed to have paid over N1 trillion as petroleum subsidy. Indeed, in March 2022, N220 billion was deducted as oil subsidy with a promise that N328 billion will be deducted in April 2022. This is unacceptable.
“NNPC and Federal Inland Revenue Service as well as other remitting agencies continue to apply an exchange rate of N389/$1 as against the import and export window of N416/$1. The extent of this leakage can be better felt, if this rate is compared to the current N570/$1.
“From available records, about N7.6 trillion is withheld between 2012 and 2021, by NNPC from the federation account. All these are said to be payments for oil subsidy.
“Conclusively, we believe all these leakages in NNPC have been made possible because the president is also the minister of petroleum. The urgent separation of these two portfolios have become necessary.”
Similarly, they expressed concerns over reported incidence of theft of crude oil “ranging from 80 per cent to 95 per cent of production made by industry practitioners and called on the Federal Government to take appropriate measures to reverse the trend and bring perpetrators to book.
Furthermore, the PDP governors noted that the All Progressives Congress (APC) does not deserve to be on the ballot for the 2023 general election.
According to them, a comparative analysis of data from the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics indicated that Nigerians were better off in 2015 under the PDP administration than in the present APC-led government.