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PIB: Ministry cannot explain N500m public enlightenment expenditure

By BusinessNews Staff on March 6, 2014

The Ministry of Petroleum Resources on Tuesday tried in vain to convince the Senate Committee on Gas on how it spent the N500m it received last year for the sensitisation of Nigerians on the Petroleum Industry Bill.

There was a mild drama when the Permanent Secretary in the ministry, Mr. Danaladi Kifasi, who represented the minister, Mrs. Deziani Alison-Madueke, at the 2014 budget defence of the ministry at the Senate, could not provide the details of the expenditure because he was new to the ministry.

Kifasi was posted to the ministry in August last year.

He explained that from the records he met at the ministry, the N500m was expended on radio and television jingles, newspaper advertisements and purchase of monitoring vehicles, among others, without providing the details.

A member of the committee, Senator Bello Tukur, who raised the issue, queried the involvement of the ministry in the PIB enlightenment campaign in view of the fact that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation was the parastatal driving the passage of the bill.

The permanent secretary also admitted before the committee that there were budgetary allocations to the ministry for the development of gas infrastructure even when it lacked the necessary technical manpower and capacity to execute such a project.

About $3.16bn was allocated to the ministry for gas infrastructure capital projects in the 2013 budget, out of which $1.7bn was released to it.

The Chairman of the committee, Senator Nkechi Nwogu, demanded to know the progress made by the ministry in the area of gas infrastructure development.

“Somebody should tell this committee what you did in the area of gas infrastructure and development in 2013,” Nwogu said.

Kifasi, however, said, “On the part of the ministry, absolutely nothing was done on gas infrastructure development because we do not have the technical capacity to go into the construction of gas pipelines.”

The ministry’s Director, Public Relations and Press, Mr. Kingsley Agha, later said the ministry was not actually given the opportunity to explain the details of the expenditure on public enlightenment.

He said there were evidences all over the country that the funds were used for the mounting of billboards in strategic locations in major cities as well as proof of radio and television campaigns.

Meanwhile, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Banking, Senator Bassey Otu, on Tuesday urged members of staff of the Central Bank of Nigeria not to allow the recent suspension of the governor, Mr. Lamido Sanusi, to distract them from effectively discharging their mandate to the citizens.

Otu made the appeal during a hearing on the implementation of the 2013 budget and the presentation of the 2014 estimates of the CBN at the National Assembly.

Otu said, “You have been doing quite alright in terms of performance. The state of the economy has been very challenging. There has been a lot of controversies in recent times concerning the central bank. We won’t want it to affect the institution.

“We want everybody to concentrate and do the work the Nigerian people want you to do. Issues will be sorted out at the appropriate time, but they must not affect the productivity, the direction and objectives of the institution.”

He called on the CBN to live up to its responsibility and advised the bank’s officials to remain focused and concentrate on their jobs.

In his presentation, the Deputy Governor, Corporate Services, CBN, Alhaji Suleiman Barau, attributed the high budgetary expenditure of 2013 to quantitative easing in the United States and Western Europe.

He said the development led to an upsurge in foreign portfolio investment inflow by investors, who were desirous of taking advantage of the higher yield prevailing in the Nigerian market.

Barau said that it was not unlikely that the pressure on the foreign reserves stemmed from the activities of the foreign investors, who wanted to repatriate the returns on their investments back home.

[Punch]

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