Yemie Adeoye
02 November 2013, Lagos – Chairman House Committee on Petroleum, Downstream, Mr. Dakuku Peterside has chided the Federal Government and its various agencies responsible for the regulation and importation of kerosene, blaming them for the over N634 billion Naira spent on subsidizing the product in 3 years.
According to him, the sum accounted for a third of the nation’s capital budget but has been used to service deep-rooted corruption in the downstream petroleum industry.
He made the disclosure as he lamented that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, has supplied about 2.92 billion litres of kerosene to the Nigeria market from September 2012 to August 2013 with an average import of 11 million litres per day.
With these figures, Hon. Peterside revealed that in 2010, Nigeria spent N110, 068,533,988 to subsidize kerosene, noting that this was not the cost of kerosene but the cost of subsidizing the product alone.
He also lamented that in 2011, the situation got worse, as government spent about N324, 089,961,319 on kerosene subsidy, stressing that it was “same year corruption was democratize in the downstream sector”.
He said: “There was also some investigation that shows that the downstream sector is entrenched in deep corruption in Nigeria. That year we spent N324, 089,961,319 on kerosene subsidy. In 2012 although we are yet to reconcile this, we spent N200 billion subsidizing kerosene.
“And so in three years, we’ve spent N634 billion subsidizing kerosene which is one third of what we spend in a year on capital budget.
“We spend not up to 4.5billion on capital budget in a year but in three years we subsidizing kerosene we spend more than one third.
“Any Country that spends most of its funds on consumption will not grow, and so that explains why Nigeria is not moving forward. How can we move forward when most of our fund is spent servicing corruption?”