The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva has expressed doubts over Nigeria’s daily petrol consumption figures, describing them as crazy and opaque.
The minister who appeared on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), in apparent frustration, noted that there’s nothing that needed to be interrogated that had not been questioned on the subsidy matter.
Sylva contended that figures released by concerned authorities were questionable, stressing that the best solution to the issue would have been to completely remove the subsidy.
Nigeria’s subsidy regime has for decades remained a subject of controversy, with the figures from the authorities ranging from between 50 million litres per day to around 103 million litres.
As at today, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) is the sole importer of the product, since private businessmen exited the scene due to non-availability of foreign exchange years ago.
Having backtracked on its plan to remove fuel subsidy as dictated by the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), the executive arm of government is set to approach the National Assembly to approve the N3 trillion for the payment of subsidies in 2022. The government last week extended the implementation by 18 months.
Sylva alleged that a few persons were holding the rest of the country to ransom, explaining that the rich rather than the most vulnerable in the country gain more from the payment of subsidies than the poor.
Speaking on the dynamics of rising consumption figures and increasing subsidy payment, Sylva explained that although there was something fishy about the data, there’s nothing that hadn’t been done in the past to muscle those bleeding the country without success.
He said: “There have been efforts at controlling some of the smuggling. And then something dramatic happened. When we had the deregulation discussions, and the price moved up to N162 from N145 where I met it, we realised that the consumption dropped to less than 50 million litres or to the 40 million.
“So, later on, once the exchange rate also now moved up a little bit and swallowed the gains we made from the N162 move, the figures increased again.
“And sometimes, the figures you hear are crazy. I mean, when they tell you 90 million litres a day, I mean, they’re crazy figures. So I mean, so for me what is the sum total of all this? We’ve been interrogating these numbers for 20 years.
“We continue to interrogate these figures because we all know that there is a problem here, it’s opaque. The opportunity, the premium is not coming to government and it is not going to the poor people. It is going to a select people who are feeding fat on these things.
“So why don’t we just get rid of this thing? Okay, we should interrogate this thing, but I mean, to me that is not the solution. Why don’t we get just get rid of this whole subsidy so that we know that this problem is over once and for all.
“I know when people say the figures are… I mean, we agree that the figures are all opaque. We agree. That’s why we are saying look, let’s stop all the shenanigans. Let’s stop all this discussion.
“Let’s leave all this opaqueness, all this corruption in the subsidy, let us move away from subsidy and go on higher ground. And then they say no, no, no. There’s been trial of subsidy thieves. Oh, we’ve gone on television to say okay, these are the template, these are the components of the templates.”
The minister maintained that even labour which is against the removal of the subsidy knows the issues, adding that Nigeria continues to hemorrhage because the subsidy regime persists.