It looks as if the corruption in the nation’s oil and gas industry is getting bigger and bigger daily. Right now, we are into the story of another $14.9bn allegedly missing profit from NLNG. The House of Representatives is currently seeking to know what happened to the fund, which represented the dividends accruing from the sale of liquefied gas from 2004 to 2014, and which the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Company (NLNG) admitted it had paid to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
There is a House Committee on Public Accounts whose responsibility is to perform its oversight functions on the NNPC and NLNG. The chairman of the committee, Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, said his committee would move a motion at plenary on March 3, to compel the NNPC to bring relevant documents for the purpose of probing the matter. But in a swift reaction, the NNPC, in its characteristic manner, moved to stop the House from going ahead with the probe through its lawyer, Mike Ozekhome, claiming that “the committee had no right to request for the NLNG accounts”.
On its part, the NLNG had told members of the panel that the Federal Government has 51 percent holding in NLNG while 41 percent is owned by Shell and other private investors. The NLNG is in possession of the amount of fund from the Federal Government’s 51 percent holding which, on its part, it had returned to the Federal Government as dividends between 2004 and 2014, through the NNPC.
Adeola said they wrote the NNPC asking for “evidence for the sources of revenues, bank statements, and every expenditure for that account and any other item that would assist in their investigation”. The above evidence is necessary for transparency and accountability in governments, ministries, parastatals and other agencies. But for reasons best known to the NNPC, its lawyer, Mike Ozekhome & Co, wrote quoting section 88 and other sections of the constitution “as to why they cannot and will not come before the committee with these particular documents”.
We agree with Adeola that Mr. Ozekhome operates a private law firm and his chamber’s opinion could not have necessarily represented that of the law courts and that the attempt by the chambers and NNPC to keep the records requested for from being scrutinised show “that there is more to what we are seeing”. The committee chairman lamented the fact that while the committee only made a simple request on transactions that concern the generality of Nigerians, “the next line of action is to go to your lawyer to start writing and from there move to court to seek injunction preventing us from requesting for that document … This tells you the extent they have used the judiciary to stall a lot of investigations we are carrying out as a House”.
The NLNG has been a success story; so we wonder why it has to be enmeshed in the familiar mess with which the NNPC is well known. The NNPC under the current Minister of Petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke, is notorious for using the court to halt any probe of her activities and sleazes in her ministry, and this one is no exception. We wonder whether, with the usual assistance of the courts that readily grant injunctions to the NNPC on matters of this nature, there would ever be any investigation or probe in the NNPC under the current administration.
This will remain the case as long as the NNPC gets away with the habit of always seeking cover under legal technicalities which, curiously enough, the courts freely and quickly oblige it whenever it is asked to render account of money in its custody.
