Final letter to Dame Jonathan on the NNPC missing fund on February 27, 2014 / in Viewpoint 7:06 pm / Comments THIS third and last letter on SLS [Sanusi Lamido Sanusi] and the missing fund at the NNPC is reaching you after the man has been suspended; albeit sacked, as that was the path Justice Ayo Salami, the former President of Court of Appeal, followed. Even at that, the suspension cannot down-grade the importance, in quantity of content, of this third letter. As l said in the first and second letters to you Madam, SLS picked the figure of exported oil, looked at the amount returned to the Federated Account, and concluded that the returned amount did not correspond with the value of the crude oil exported. At the end of the day, more to mislead the majority of uninitiated Nigerians, the language of reconciliation of accounts was introduced by the “Professionals”. This group of professionals was led by the erudite world-acclaimed financial magician, our own sister and the Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. It was this most respected woman of substance that admitted that money was missing but not the big amount SLS talked about. According to her, at least to protect her colleague Minister of Petroleum Resources and the rotten NNPC, what was missing was only US$10.8 billion. Madam, with this admission by the one that coordinates the economy, facts of legal conviction in any court of competent jurisdiction has been established, to wit- missing money. And since money does not possess wings to fly, it can only be natural to admit to one fact, to wit- somebody or a group of people stole the said “missing” money. It follows therefore to conclude that the thief or thieves must be somewhere between the NNPC and Ministry of Petroleum Resources. My dear Madam, the amount admittedly stolen, at conversion rates of one US$ to N160, is one trillion, six billion Naira. But should we evenly guess that the stolen amount is US$20 billion, that will translate to three trillion, two hundred billion Naira at the same conversion rate of one US Dollar to N160. This is a whopping sum that can properly settle the whole 160 million Nigerians! One more quick point I need to make here before we go into the details of the “fall-out” is another fact of theft publicly admitted at the Senate by the Minister of Petroleum Resources and her NNPC. The Minister, Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke, told the National Assembly that she spent N3.5 billion as kerosene subsidy without budget appropriation. What audacity! What an effrontery! There seems to be a racket being perpetrated by the NNPC against the Nigerian people. Permit me to tell you quickly how this racket works. They take our money directly from the NNPC coffers [without budgetary allocation – it is not even known to any outsider when and how the money is taken], import DPK at N150, allegedly selling same to Nigerians at N50 [which is a big lie because they shared the imported kerosene amongst their racketeering chains to sell for between N150 to N250 per litre] and they turned around again to deduct the balance of N100 from every litre of the imported fuel. What happens here is that they make N100 per litre from whatever quantity of kerosene allegedly imported. Madam, just for your information, NNPC allegedly imported [according to the figure it released to the National Assembly last week] 2.2 trillion metric tonnes in 2010, 1.9 trillion metric tonnes in 2011, 2.6 trillion metric tonnes in 2012 and 2.6 trillion metric tonnes in 2013. This brings total of kerosene allegedly imported from 2010 to 2013 to 9.6 trillion metric tonnes. Let us convert this 9.6 trillion metric tonnes to litres of kerosene so that you can see how a few people have undermined this country financially. One metric tonne is about 1,223.77 [based on density of kerosene being 817.15kg/m3] or approximately 1,224 litres. 9.6 trillion metric tonnes will give us 117,504,000000000 litres of Kerosene. This cabal/mafia made N117, 504,000,000,000 or US$734,400,000,000 [seven hundred and thirty four trillion, four hundred billion US Dollars] for the past four years. This is what NNPC, Ministry of Petroleum Resources and few players in the oil industry have reaped from Nigeria and Nigerians. My sister, will you not be disturbed by this figure? Your husband, my own brother, did not even know that anything near this is happening yet he appointed people “to watch his back”. What is the bottom line on “this tip on the iceberg” revelation? Permit me to say one or two words about the suspension of SLS. The man is arrogantly brilliant and delicately loquacious with an everlasting radicalism in his blood – all are bad for the “Nigerian concept of Public Servant”. Yes, he is a bad news any day on his utterances but for blowing the whistle on this NNPC issue, the civilised world of humanity, which is addicted to fundamental hatred for corruption, shall always be grateful to him [SLS] into eternity. Yes, again, your husband should have sacked him about February 2012, when he queried him, through the then National Security Adviser, the late retired General Owoye Andrew Azazi, over reckless and seditious statements in an interview he granted to the Financial Times of London. Yes, he “over-ran the runway” in that interview. Yet, SLS refused to answer the query, saying that “I am not answerable to the NSA – I can only answer query signed personally by the President”. My brother, your husband, did not sign any query for him or compelled him to answer to the one signed by the late General Azazi on behalf of the President. If your husband had moved against him, he would have been able to secure two third of the Senate membership, as stipulated by law, to sack the man, there and then. What the present suspension of SLS has done is to make him [SLS] hero of the war against corruption and turned your husband to become the greatest promoter of corruption in the annals of Nigerian history. Your husband never thought of it this way, but because he listened to bad advisers around him; the same thieves we just finished discussing, he is now the villain while SLS becomes the victor. What an irony of life! I conclude by thanking you once again for reading all my letters on this subject matter. It might be too late to reverse the SLS situation but what you read might be able to prepare you adequately enough in the future, in telling your husband, my brother, to be very “careful with some of his ministers”, mostly at the oil and financial sectors, because these are the people working for his political peril. These people, my sister, might deny you the continuous tenancy of Aso Villa beyond 2015. Deal with them before they endanger you, is my candid advice. Mr. GODWIN ETAKIBUEBU, a public analyst, wrote from Warri, Delta State.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 11:11:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015