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Reps to get kerosene subsidy report next week

By BusinessNews Staff on October 24, 2014

Members of the House of Representatives will next week know the extent of malpractices in the kerosene subsidy scheme.

The House Committee on Petroleum (Downstream), chaired by Mr. Dakuku Peterside, is currently being finalised by the House of Representatives our correspondent gathered on Tuesday.

The probe of the kerosene subsidy scam by the legislators, our correspondent learnt, became necessary due to the irregularities that had been discovered in scheme, where the government had continued to pay subsidy on the product without Nigerians benefiting from the arrangement.

Under the subsidy arrangement, Nigerians are meant to pay N50 per litre for the product; but that has not been the case as people are buying the product for N120 and above in filling stations nationwide.

When our correspondent contacted Peterside, he admitted that irregularities had prevailed in the scheme, but declined to provide details of his committee’s report.

He said, “The truth of the matter is that we have not laid our report before the House. We are constrained by the rules of the House not to let out our findings out until it is laid on the floor of the House.

“They will hold us responsible. That is where we are. I am sure all these will not take more than one week.”

Earlier in the year, the committee had disclosed that the Federal Government spent N634bn as subsidy on Dual Purpose Kerosene between 2010 and 2012, describing the whole arrangement as a network of corruption and fraud.

Peterside, who had spoken at a seminar organised by the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Lagos, maintained that Nigeria, the world’s sixth biggest crude exporter, could not move forward with the present arrangement where the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation was holding the monopoly of kerosene importation.

He had said, “No country that spends most of its funds on consumption will grow. And so that explains why Nigeria is not moving forward. How can we move forward when most of our funds are spent servicing corruption?

“Kerosene subsidy is a network of corruption; it is a network of fraud. So why are some people blaming the fraud on the monopoly of the NNPC? Even when you ask major marketers, they will tell you that the monopoly of the NNPC is responsible for what we are going through today to access kerosene.”

In February this year, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Aminu Tambuwal, said that available records indicated that the Federal Government spent over N1tn on kerosene subsidy between 2010 and 2013.

Tambuwal said in spite of the expenditure not having the approval of the National Assembly, the product was not available for “suffering Nigerians” to buy.

He also noted that the product was not being sold in any part of the country at the subsidised price of N50 per litre.

“Curiously, since there were no budgetary provisions for subsidy on kerosene, the people of Nigeria would obviously be interested in knowing the source of funding of kerosene subsidy and on whose authority such money was appropriated,” the Speaker had said.

[Punch]

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