Timipre Marlin Silva, Nigeria’s high profile minister of state for petroleum, has finally opted for the path of honour in the raging controversy over Nigeria’s daily petrol consumption figures.Fp
The minister recently told his interviewers in NTA International, the federal government television station, that the daily petrol consumption figures flaunted by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) were “crazy and opaque”.
Silva was the last man standing for NNPC in the controversy over how much petrol Nigeria consumes in a day. His statement in NTA is a strange confession. Sometime in February 2020, the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), the defunct regulatory arm of NNPC, issued a statement putting Nigeria’s daily petrol consumption at 38.2 million liters.
Silva as the minister of state for petroleum promptly countered with claims that Nigeria actually consumes 60 million liters of petrol daily. The minister was speaking as the final authority on the controversial issue. He rubbished the DPR figures with the audacity of someone with the final say on the controversy.
The DPR did not contest the minister’s statement since he is the boss. It would have amounted to high level insubordination that could have earned the head of DPR a sack. No one in Nigeria’s public service has the temerity to contest issues with his boss.
In the developed world, DPR would have reduced the minister to something of an ignorant usurper for speaking with seeming indubitable finality in a subject he has no data to back his claims.
But Nigeria is a strange place where people prefer their jobs to their integrity. Silva had his way as he bullied the regulator into curious silence on the issue. However, the whole world knew who to believe. Even as the minister had his way, the DPR had the day.
Now that Timipre Silva has finally confessed after considering the cost of telling the world a transparent lie, NNPC is alone in its tale of cooked up figures on Nigeria’s daily petrol consumption.
Silva was the last man standing for NNPC. Now that he has joined the Babel of voices denouncing NNPC as a scammer, all Nigeria needs to expose the petrol subsidy scam is for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to open criminal investigation into Nigeria’s petrol consumption figures.
When the truth is finally established, those who cooked up the figures should be prosecuted and sentenced accordingly. The proceeds of the scam should be recovered to the last kobo and returned to the federation account. That is the way to stem Nigeria’s precipitous decent into financial abyss.
With the petrol subsidy scam, NNPC is battling to confirm a strange economic hypothesis that no one in the world can prove with logical coherence. NNPC is battling to establish a near impossible economic logicality suggesting that consumers buy more petrol when the price is higher. A natural economic course suggests that consumers use less petrol when the price is higher.
NNPC’S daily petrol consumption figures rise each time the naira depreciates and hikes the landing cost of imported petrol above the official pump price.
In December 2017, NNPC announced that the deregulation of petrol pump price and the consequent doubling of the price to N145 per liter had forced down petrol consumption to 28 million liters per day.
In February 2018, just two months later, crude oil price rose and forced the landing cost of petrol above the open market pump price of N145 per liter.
With recession pushing millions of Nigerians into poverty, the federal government considered the political cost of petrol pump price hike as too dangerous to implement. It slipped petrol subsidy back into the system through the back door and ordered NNPC to accommodate the loss from selling petrol below the landing cost.
NNPC responded by announcing that daily petrol consumption had suddenly surged from 28 million to 60 million liters per day even as motorists were still adjusting to the doubling of the pump price a few months earlier.
Femi Falana, a senior advocate of Nigeria (SAN), petitioned Ibe Kachikwu, the then minister of state for petroleum. Falana demanded shipping documents to support NNPC’s claim on the alleged surge in petrol consumption.
Kachikwu ordered NNPC to respond to Falana’s demand. NNPC referred the matter to its lawyers. The lawyers told Falana that the documents he demanded were trade secrets that were not covered by the Freedom of Information Act he invoked. Falana lost. If NNPC’s petrol consumption figures were irrefutable, no one would have hidden the figures.
It is now clear that Falana’s loss to NNPC was the entire nation’s defeat. Now the governors are wailing in utter helplessness as what is left for sharing by the three tiers of government after NNPC deducts subsidy on 60 million liters of petrol per day, amounts to pittance.
Nigeria is sailing perilously close to bankruptcy. The fraudulent deductions on petrol subsidy based on bloated consumption figures is partially responsible for the dangerous decline in revenue.
The next factor responsible for the dearth of revenue is crude oil theft.
Crude oil theft and petrol subsidy fraud are two huge pipes through which Nigeria’s lean income is siphoned into private pockets. Ironically, the federal government has proved to be incorrigibly inept in tackling any of the heinous crimes.
Last week Tony Elumelu, chairman of United Bank for Africa (UBA), warned that Nigeria lost $4 billion to crude oil theft in the first three quarters of 2021.
The federal government knows that $5 billion is lost yearly to crude oil thieves. Unfortunately, it does not know who the thieves are.
Everyone in the federal government knows that Nigeria does not consume more than 35 million liters of petrol in a day. However, no one knows how 35 million liters suddenly became 65 million or even 102 million liters as NNPC claimed in September 2021.
The federal government can evade the impending bankruptcy if it stops petrol subsidy fraud and crude oil theft. It is difficult to halt the two dangerous sources of revenue losses because they are perpetrated by high net worth criminals known to the rulers.
We have however got to a point where government must choose between the service of the high net worth criminals and the welfare of 207 million people.
Petrol subsidy scammers and crude oil thieves have reduced Nigeria to the world headquarters of poverty. If they are not stopped, the irate youth they forced into armed robbery, kidnappings and armed banditry would make Nigeria too dangerous for them to enjoy their loots.
