The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, CISLAC, has called on President Bola Tinubu to work towards tackling fraudulent regime in the petrol pricing in the country.
Mr Tinubu had announced that fuel subsidy has gone for good, a situation that skyrocketed the price of the commodity to about N500 per litre.
In a statement on Thursday, the CISLAC executive-director, Auwal Rafsanjani, called for critical dialogue that stimulates transparency and accountability in the extractive sector as the new administration emerges.
“The Petroleum Industry Law is clear NNPC has no absolute power to be fixing prices without dialogue and having the interests of the poor Nigerians therefore Petroleum Industry Act must be implemented and complied with as a way of stamping out corruption in extractive sector in Nigeria,” Mr Rafsanjani added.
The centre also recalled that the fuel subsidy regime in Nigeria has been rife with elite manipulations and intrigues, stressing that no administration has been able to give Nigerians the true picture of what happens in NNPC.
The statement said that a report by the House of Representatives committee revealed that Nigeria’s fuel subsidy scheme cost the country $6.8bn over a three-year period (2009-2011).
“The NNPC was single-handedly responsible for almost half of the siphoned subsidy funds and was “found not to be accountable to anybody or authority”.
“Seventy-two (72) fuel importers, some of whom had allegedly close links to senior government officials, were also singled out.
“In one case, payments totaling exactly $6.4m flowed from the state treasury 128 times within 24 hours to “unknown entities”. Investigators discovered that importers were paid for 59 million liters a day, while the country only consumes 35 million.
“In 2012, the pump price of fuel was N65 ($0.40) per litre, against a landing cost of N139. The government thus contributed a N73 subsidy per litre, for an annual total of N1.2trillion ($7.6billion), or 2.6 per cent of the country’s GDP.
“According to the Nigeria Extractive Industry and Transparency Initiative, Nigeria spent about N722.3 billion on fuel subsidy in 2018.
“The NNPC’s financial and operations report for 2019 showed that Nigeria spent N326.43 billion in four months (N104.35 billion, N102.24 billion, N30.64 billion and N89.19 billion in January, February, March and April, respectively) in 2019.
“The PPPRA disclosed that the NNPC spent an average of N36.59 subsidizing every litre of petrol imported into the country in November 2019.
“The NNPC currently the sole importer of petrol in the country reported that Nigeria consumes between 55 million and 60 million litres of petrol every day.
“Going by a daily consumption of 55 million litres and an average of N36.59 spent on subsidy per litre, the federal government of Nigeria spent N60.37 billion on subsidizing fuel in November 2019, increasing by over 2000% when compared with the amount spent on subsidy in the same period 2018,” the centre noted.
