“The sector is no longer the black hole that it once was, but we could still use more transparency. Things are opening up. There could be more in the area of contracts, ownership and expenditure transparency, but definitely there is some progress,” Adio said.
“The chairmen of the harmonisation committee from both the House of Representatives and that of the Senate, and members of the committee have already been named. So, I do not think there would be any issue arising from the internal efforts of the National Assembly,” he stated.
“As a result of the abundance of natural gas in Nigeria, we should be able to convert all the flared gas into methanol which will make it more useful in energy, power and petrochemical industries.”
He said it was imperative to intensify and support the Federal government’s economic diversification program to free the economy from the “vagaries of oil price volatility, which during a period of glut, could spell doom for the nation”.
The report further showed that from January to December, 2017, NNPC remitted a total of N857.36bn into the Federation Account, N644.05bn for Joint Venture financing, and N19 billion to the Federal Government for debt repayment.
“We actually import one million tonnes of PMS every month into a country that produces oil and gas and has refinery. It is a shameful thing, it doesn’t make sense and that is what we are trying to address,” he said.
“The promise we got last week from the National Assembly was that before the end of the second quarter of this year which we see as June 30, they promise the three other bills will also be concluded and passed.
Professor Njodi said despite the harrowing experience of the adoptees in the captivity of the insurgents, the University of Maiduguri was focused on carrying through the exploration programme in the inland sedimentary basins.
NNPC said the requested information is in the nature of “commercial, financial and trade secrets information, which obviously are either subject to non-disclosure agreements or whose disclosure could reasonably interfere with NNPC’s existing contractual obligations or harm third parties’ interests.
He said, “On the Lake Chad oil exploration, we have been working tirelessly and we thank the president for rescuing some of our lecturers that were involved in the exploration in the region. We are going back to the Chad basin with full force.”
