Diezani Alison-Madueke, a former minister,
has addressed almost all of the questions that had been
begging for answers for years in a grand interview to
This Day.
The excerpts of a two-hour long talk were published on June
7, 2015, Sunday, while the actual date of the talk has not
been provided.
Among the topics she mentioned were: accomplishments
and the structural problems of the petroleum sector, the $20
billion controversy and Emir Sanusi II, the PwC forensic
audit, the efforts to end the fuel subsidy regime and
privatise the refineries, her stand off with the National
Assembly, her current absence from the country, and many
more.
Naij.com brings you five most important blocks of the
interview (questions and answers):
1. Health
Q: So what exactly is the nature of your illness; is it true
that it is cancerous in nature?
A: That is a private matter that should not concern the
public.
2. About missing billions
Please do not say I stole $20 billion or $18.5 billion because
I did not at any point in time. And if NNPC misappropriated
funds or so, they have the entire explanation and more
forensic audit should be done to determine how and why.
But people should not make damaging accusations which
have nothing to do with an individual. At no point did I steal
from the Nigerian state.
In fact, the first mantra I had from the time I came in was
that I will never touch anything that has to do with the
Federation Account and I never did and I will take that to my
grave. So I will suggest that this issue of $20 billion or $18
billion be dropped because that is the major problem I had
with my job. I was accused of unsavoury things, but which
were actually accusations against NNPC and the audit was
deployed to clarify all these things. So let us deal with the
issues. I have never gone around accusing people of doing
this or that, I have always stuck with the issues even when I
was the most abused minister, I was professional, I stuck to
the issues and responded only to the issues.
3. About Sanusi Lamido Sanusi
Q: Emir Sanusi in a recent interview with the Financial
Times after the release of the full PwC report brought
up another figure of yet another $18.5 billion that is
unaccounted for with reference to the kerosene subsidy
issue. Kerosene subsidy has always remained
controversial and yet the product is not available to
Nigerians at the official price till now. What is it that
can be done to stop the scam in this area?
A: Well, like I said before, it has to be deregulated. Take
away the subsidy and let the market parameters of supply
and demand come into play whether it is DPK or household
kerosene. I think until that happens, we are not going to
achieve a clear landing where kerosene is concerned.
Secondly, we still have to come back to the fact that we must
get our security agencies to assist us in terms of vandalism
and sabotage. I know it is difficult.
I know the problem that they have as well and there is also
the problem of funding. But you know we have product
pipelines that transverse the majority of the country, but we
can’t use them because great tranches are sabotaged or
vandalised either all of the time or some of the time. What
happens is that we still have to truck products from one part
of Nigeria to another part of Nigeria, which is why the
Petroleum Equalisation Fund still exists because it still has to
pay bridging costs and we have transporters now having to
add the cost of moving those products from one part of the
country to another, which again causes the disparity in the
cost of these products. And again, you have people who
engage in unwholesome business practices and sell these
products at higher prices than the official price. So I would
say once more that we need to remove the subsidy on DPK,
just as we need to remove the subsidy on PMS as well,
which was why I pushed for complete deregulation on
January 1, 2012. And I will say it again, Nigerians have to be
prepared to go through a little period maybe of discomfort.
But the market forces of demand and supply means that as
some point there would be some sort of balance or
equilibrium in terms of the cost viz-a-viz the supply. I think
that is the only way we can get rid of the kind of corruption
and scam in that area.
Q: But Sanusi accused you of sustaining the subsidy
despite the directive by the late President Umaru
Yar’Adua that the subsidy on kerosene be stopped and
he said that had you obeyed that directive, the alleged
amount of unaccounted money, would not be missing?
A: Let me just make this very clear to Nigeria as a whole
because this is an area of great pain for me. That Sanusi
should say I sustained the subsidy is not true, when very
clearly in 2009, the late President Yar’Adua gave a written
directive to the late Minister of Petroleum Resources Alhaji
Rilwan Lukman that he should remove the subsidy on DPK.
This subsidy on DPK was never removed by the late Minister
of Petroleum Resources, whom I considered to be
somebody that I regarded almost as a mentor. For reasons
best known to late Alhaji Rilwan Lukman and the then
economic team, the Finance Minister and others, they never
implemented the directive to remove the subsidy. By law
and the Petroleum Act, you must gazette such a removal for
it to become law and of course it has to be published so that
Nigerians would know that there has been a change in the
price of the petroleum product. It is illegal to do it or to say
you have done it, if you have not gazetted it.
Even before that, former President Goodluck Jonathan who
was the vice-president at that time, had also clarified, even
in a public media broadcast and in person as well, that the
subsidy was never removed. So I sought clarification from
him and he also made the clarification clear in a public
media broadcast about a year and a half ago, that the
subsidy was never removed. So at no time did I go against a
president’s directive. It is not possible that I would have
come in as a Minister of Petroleum in 2010 and found that
kerosene subsidy no longer existed and that it had been
gazetted and I would have suddenly upturned it.
Government is a continuum and so it was not possible that I
could have done that. So I feel very pained that Sanusi
would make it sound like I was the one who went against
late President Yar’Adua’s directive. I think this should clarify
this issue once and for all.
4. About forensic audit
Q: On the PwC forensic audit, why did it take so long for
you to make it public, or why was it that you had to wait
for so much pressure to be applied, to the extent that
President Muhammadu Buhari had to say there would
be another audit of NNPC, which forced the government
to release the full PwC report?
I am not really in a position to answer that simply because
the PwC forensic audit was put in place by the Auditor-
General of the Federation and not by me. So the full
deployment of the forensic report was not under my
purview at all. We saw the summary just as everybody else
saw the summary and at some point, we had to request the
full details to be able to look at it as well. So the timing of
the release of the audit had nothing to do with the Minister
of Petroleum Resources. But we felt all along that the full
report should have been released from the get go, so that
Nigerians would have an opportunity to look at it. I had said
from the beginning that at any point in time, the NNPC
should be absolutely open for audit of any type. In fact, that
is necessary and so I am not sure whether or not the PwC
report coming out at the time it did or not coming out
earlier on, has anything to do with any other forensic audit
that may be done. I think that other forensic audits have to
be done on the NNPC.
5. About privatisation of refineries
Let me also add that even in terms of the refineries and
refined products for Nigeria which has been a major
problem for us over the years in terms of the optimisation
of our refining capacity and the run down state in which we
found the refineries when we came in between 2010 and
2011. When we looked at the situation and digested it in
every possible manner, it was found that just like the power
sector, government has no business being in major areas of
infrastructure such as refineries. It is inefficient for
government to be there.
So while government should in fact hold a certain
percentage, in terms of its ownership structure so that it has
a stake in the refineries, these refineries should be opened
up to private sector entrepreneurs who can take them and
run with them, and create them into models of private
sector efficiency for the benefit of the nation in terms of
refined products deployment in the short, medium and
long-term. Accordingly, we moved in 2013, prepared the
framework for the privatisation of the refineries to ensure
that indigenous players could come in and turnaround our
refineries, recreate them and begin to give us the needed
distribution and supply of products. With the president’s
approval, we moved on this aggressively. Unfortunately, as
we tried to deploy it, there was a major push back again,
this time from the unions, who were completely against the
privatisation of our refineries and as you can see, over the
last one-and-a-half years, it has been difficult to optimise the
usage of the refineries because the funding to invest in them
from the government side is just not there. And
unfortunately, we have seen over the last one year, a drop
in the price of crude oil by almost 50 per cent, which means
that our funding level has almost been depleted.
has addressed almost all of the questions that had been
begging for answers for years in a grand interview to
This Day.
The excerpts of a two-hour long talk were published on June
7, 2015, Sunday, while the actual date of the talk has not
been provided.
Among the topics she mentioned were: accomplishments
and the structural problems of the petroleum sector, the $20
billion controversy and Emir Sanusi II, the PwC forensic
audit, the efforts to end the fuel subsidy regime and
privatise the refineries, her stand off with the National
Assembly, her current absence from the country, and many
more.
Naij.com brings you five most important blocks of the
interview (questions and answers):
1. Health
Q: So what exactly is the nature of your illness; is it true
that it is cancerous in nature?
A: That is a private matter that should not concern the
public.
2. About missing billions
Please do not say I stole $20 billion or $18.5 billion because
I did not at any point in time. And if NNPC misappropriated
funds or so, they have the entire explanation and more
forensic audit should be done to determine how and why.
But people should not make damaging accusations which
have nothing to do with an individual. At no point did I steal
from the Nigerian state.
In fact, the first mantra I had from the time I came in was
that I will never touch anything that has to do with the
Federation Account and I never did and I will take that to my
grave. So I will suggest that this issue of $20 billion or $18
billion be dropped because that is the major problem I had
with my job. I was accused of unsavoury things, but which
were actually accusations against NNPC and the audit was
deployed to clarify all these things. So let us deal with the
issues. I have never gone around accusing people of doing
this or that, I have always stuck with the issues even when I
was the most abused minister, I was professional, I stuck to
the issues and responded only to the issues.
3. About Sanusi Lamido Sanusi
Q: Emir Sanusi in a recent interview with the Financial
Times after the release of the full PwC report brought
up another figure of yet another $18.5 billion that is
unaccounted for with reference to the kerosene subsidy
issue. Kerosene subsidy has always remained
controversial and yet the product is not available to
Nigerians at the official price till now. What is it that
can be done to stop the scam in this area?
A: Well, like I said before, it has to be deregulated. Take
away the subsidy and let the market parameters of supply
and demand come into play whether it is DPK or household
kerosene. I think until that happens, we are not going to
achieve a clear landing where kerosene is concerned.
Secondly, we still have to come back to the fact that we must
get our security agencies to assist us in terms of vandalism
and sabotage. I know it is difficult.
I know the problem that they have as well and there is also
the problem of funding. But you know we have product
pipelines that transverse the majority of the country, but we
can’t use them because great tranches are sabotaged or
vandalised either all of the time or some of the time. What
happens is that we still have to truck products from one part
of Nigeria to another part of Nigeria, which is why the
Petroleum Equalisation Fund still exists because it still has to
pay bridging costs and we have transporters now having to
add the cost of moving those products from one part of the
country to another, which again causes the disparity in the
cost of these products. And again, you have people who
engage in unwholesome business practices and sell these
products at higher prices than the official price. So I would
say once more that we need to remove the subsidy on DPK,
just as we need to remove the subsidy on PMS as well,
which was why I pushed for complete deregulation on
January 1, 2012. And I will say it again, Nigerians have to be
prepared to go through a little period maybe of discomfort.
But the market forces of demand and supply means that as
some point there would be some sort of balance or
equilibrium in terms of the cost viz-a-viz the supply. I think
that is the only way we can get rid of the kind of corruption
and scam in that area.
Q: But Sanusi accused you of sustaining the subsidy
despite the directive by the late President Umaru
Yar’Adua that the subsidy on kerosene be stopped and
he said that had you obeyed that directive, the alleged
amount of unaccounted money, would not be missing?
A: Let me just make this very clear to Nigeria as a whole
because this is an area of great pain for me. That Sanusi
should say I sustained the subsidy is not true, when very
clearly in 2009, the late President Yar’Adua gave a written
directive to the late Minister of Petroleum Resources Alhaji
Rilwan Lukman that he should remove the subsidy on DPK.
This subsidy on DPK was never removed by the late Minister
of Petroleum Resources, whom I considered to be
somebody that I regarded almost as a mentor. For reasons
best known to late Alhaji Rilwan Lukman and the then
economic team, the Finance Minister and others, they never
implemented the directive to remove the subsidy. By law
and the Petroleum Act, you must gazette such a removal for
it to become law and of course it has to be published so that
Nigerians would know that there has been a change in the
price of the petroleum product. It is illegal to do it or to say
you have done it, if you have not gazetted it.
Even before that, former President Goodluck Jonathan who
was the vice-president at that time, had also clarified, even
in a public media broadcast and in person as well, that the
subsidy was never removed. So I sought clarification from
him and he also made the clarification clear in a public
media broadcast about a year and a half ago, that the
subsidy was never removed. So at no time did I go against a
president’s directive. It is not possible that I would have
come in as a Minister of Petroleum in 2010 and found that
kerosene subsidy no longer existed and that it had been
gazetted and I would have suddenly upturned it.
Government is a continuum and so it was not possible that I
could have done that. So I feel very pained that Sanusi
would make it sound like I was the one who went against
late President Yar’Adua’s directive. I think this should clarify
this issue once and for all.
4. About forensic audit
Q: On the PwC forensic audit, why did it take so long for
you to make it public, or why was it that you had to wait
for so much pressure to be applied, to the extent that
President Muhammadu Buhari had to say there would
be another audit of NNPC, which forced the government
to release the full PwC report?
I am not really in a position to answer that simply because
the PwC forensic audit was put in place by the Auditor-
General of the Federation and not by me. So the full
deployment of the forensic report was not under my
purview at all. We saw the summary just as everybody else
saw the summary and at some point, we had to request the
full details to be able to look at it as well. So the timing of
the release of the audit had nothing to do with the Minister
of Petroleum Resources. But we felt all along that the full
report should have been released from the get go, so that
Nigerians would have an opportunity to look at it. I had said
from the beginning that at any point in time, the NNPC
should be absolutely open for audit of any type. In fact, that
is necessary and so I am not sure whether or not the PwC
report coming out at the time it did or not coming out
earlier on, has anything to do with any other forensic audit
that may be done. I think that other forensic audits have to
be done on the NNPC.
5. About privatisation of refineries
Let me also add that even in terms of the refineries and
refined products for Nigeria which has been a major
problem for us over the years in terms of the optimisation
of our refining capacity and the run down state in which we
found the refineries when we came in between 2010 and
2011. When we looked at the situation and digested it in
every possible manner, it was found that just like the power
sector, government has no business being in major areas of
infrastructure such as refineries. It is inefficient for
government to be there.
So while government should in fact hold a certain
percentage, in terms of its ownership structure so that it has
a stake in the refineries, these refineries should be opened
up to private sector entrepreneurs who can take them and
run with them, and create them into models of private
sector efficiency for the benefit of the nation in terms of
refined products deployment in the short, medium and
long-term. Accordingly, we moved in 2013, prepared the
framework for the privatisation of the refineries to ensure
that indigenous players could come in and turnaround our
refineries, recreate them and begin to give us the needed
distribution and supply of products. With the president’s
approval, we moved on this aggressively. Unfortunately, as
we tried to deploy it, there was a major push back again,
this time from the unions, who were completely against the
privatisation of our refineries and as you can see, over the
last one-and-a-half years, it has been difficult to optimise the
usage of the refineries because the funding to invest in them
from the government side is just not there. And
unfortunately, we have seen over the last one year, a drop
in the price of crude oil by almost 50 per cent, which means
that our funding level has almost been depleted.
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