•Was the N103.4bn that NNPC spent on pipeline maintenance last year appropriated?
Alot has been said about the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) not only as an entity answerable to no one but also one with proclivities to spend public funds as it pleased, often without the strictures of parliamentary control. Or how else can we explain a recent report that the corporation spent a whopping N103.4 billion to protect oil pipelines in one year alone? And that in the year the entire budget for the Nigeria Police Force was N329.6 billion?
Like every other figure from the national oil corporation that hardly ever adds up, this one is inexplicable as it is untenable.
Titled “Report on Improving Local Refining Capacity in Nigeria”, the document is said to have been prepared by the Managing Director, Matwims Consult Limited, Mark Tubotein. Aside claiming that the corporation spent N103.4 billion for pipeline repairs and management between January and December 2015, it noted, based on the data from the NNPC, that the corporation still recorded crude oil and product losses of N57.71 billion to pipeline vandalism. Among other highlights, the report claimed that between January and August 2015 alone, there were over 1,824 cases of line breaks on Pipelines and Product Marketing Company (PPMC) pipelines.
As every Nigerian would readily agree, the scourge of pipeline is real. Aside being responsible for the devastation of the environment of the communities adjoining them, it has virtually crippled the industry – throwing its mortal darts to the nation’s treasury base in the process. Taken together with the factor of ageing pipelines that has become a recurrent factor in a good number of recorded spills, both have come to constitute existential threats which the Nigerian state can afford to ignore at its peril.
We certainly agree that both have fostered an atmosphere of emergency which deserves to be tackled with all seriousness. If anything, the time has come to nip the scourge in the bud and with all the forces available to the Federal Government. The starting point of course is the pipelines network. We have stated times without number that they need to be overhauled. Indeed, given their obsolete state, nothing short of a cast-iron guarantee of the integrity of the entire network after a duly completed overhaul will be acceptable to Nigerians. We have been too long on the matter with little or no progress made. Now is time for action.
No less is true of the business of securing the pipelines: the NNPC has a bounden duty to deploy the latest technology to check the menace. Much as we have advocated for some form of partnership with the communities, we are no less convinced that modern technology will prove more effective and save costs in the long run.
We can no longer afford the current situation in which the business of pipelines protection becomes an open licence for officials to open the taps to the treasury without restraints.
As for the huge expenditures, a number of questions naturally beg for answers. First, were the huge expenditures duly appropriated? Was it – again – a case of the national oil corporation’s open access to funds which it can use and later charge to the federation account? How were the expenditures determined? Which institutions did oversights on their disbursement? Is it also mere coincidence that the huge expenditures in question fell within the period that the Jonathan administration outsourced the protection of the pipelines to militants to the consternation of most citizens? More pertinent– how much of the funds went into securing the pipelines – or is it another instance of using pipeline protection as a cover for all manner of abuses on the treasury?
If only for the sake of the much vaunted anti-corruption stance of the Buhari administration, the anti-graft agencies should help the nation resolve these as indeed related riddles.