Sam Nda-Isaiah: Between Diezani’s Directives And Presidential Directives

It was quite fascinating watching the petroleum minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke, speak before the Senate committee last week. Obviously, she convinced no one, not least the Senate committee, culminating in the Senate agreeing to do a forensic audit of the NNPC. Tellingly, the Senate did not appear to trust the finance minister either in this matter. Even with the forensic audit, it is possible that some people will still attempt to suborn the auditors, but we wait to see. No matter what happens, no one will believe Diezani’s bogus story on the kerosene subsidy.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or get angry at Diezani’s assertion that a presidential directive does not have the force of law and so she had no problems flouting it. What she did at the Senate committee hearings was to finally confirm what people were already talking about: that Nigeria has more than one president and that she is the more powerful president. What Diezani told the whole world was that she would not take a directive from the president unless he took such a directive to the National Assembly and it was made a law. If President Umaru Yar’Adua as president issued a directive on kerosene subsidy, that directive should remain in force until he or any of his successors gave a counter-directive. A directive from the president of a country is a pronouncement that immediately becomes policy. So a mere minister, an appointee of the president, does not have the power to flout such a directive.

Diezani also spiced her statement with a few lies. She said President Yar’Adua was about to reverse the presidential directive before he fell very ill. That, of course, was a lie as Mansur Mukhtar, the minister of finance, and Rilwan Lukman, the minister of petroleum, and others linked with the issue are still alive to confirm. Diezani probably remembers the meeting of June 9, 2009, and the memo of June 10, 2009, signed by David Edevbie, Yar’Adua’s principal private secretary. In attendance at that meeting were President Yar’Adua, Vice President Jonathan, the secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), minister of finance, minister of transport, minister of petroleum, GMD of NNPC, chief economic adviser to the president and the principal private secretary to the president. The meeting decided on a proposal by finance minister Mukhtar to eliminate the subsidy on kerosene because the subsidy never got to the targeted beneficiaries. This meeting proved that President Yar’Adua consulted first before giving the directive. All of those who attended the meeting except the late president Yar’Adua are still alive, so they can be invited to shed light on the matter. President Yar’Adua didn’t just wake up one day and decided to give the presidential directive as Diezani would want us believe. It was not true that Yar’Adua issued a stay of action but fell sick afterwards. In fact, one of the members of the Senate committee expressed shock that Diezani, a minister of the federal republic, could so openly lie on such a very important subject.

But Diezani’s statement also gives a glimpse into how President Jonathan runs his government. The question that we should all be asking Diezani now is how many other presidential directives, including the ones directly issued by Jonathan, she has similarly flouted. If she said that a presidential directive to suspend the subsidy on kerosene was not law, is the payment of subsidy itself law? Which part of the Nigerian law says she should pay subsidies at all? The payment of subsidy itself is a presidential directive, not law; so why is she paying it?

The quality of governance has significantly declined since Jonathan became president. Were it not so, the petroleum minister would have been fired the day she made that declaration at the Senate committee hearings. And President Jonathan would, in fact, have fired any other impudent minister –except of course those like Diezani that share the presidency with him.

What logic is the petroleum minister trying to give about paying the kerosene subsidy anyway? In effect, she decided to flout the presidential directive because she wanted to maintain the price of kerosene at N50 per litre. Well, the bad news for her is that, the last time I checked, kerosene actually sold at over N150 per litre at 95 per cent of the sales locations. It’s the same reason, in the first place, Yar’Adua gave the presidential directive.

It is noteworthy that when the CBN governor said the NNPC did not remit more than N3 trillion into the nation’s coffers, the NNPC did not deny that. Instead, the NNPC said it spent the amount, that humongous amount, on the payment of subsidies and management of pipes. The CBN governor was very clear in his own explanation. The governor said that, of the $67 billion worth of crude shipped by NNPC between January 2012 and July 2013, the CBN has records of the remittance of $47 billion, leaving $20 billion unaccounted for. But even scarier is Sanusi’s other revelation. He said the NPDC, a subsidiary of the NNPC, and two other private companies – Atlantic Energy and Seven Energy – shipped $6 billion worth of crude oil from the nation’s oil wells but did not remit the proceeds to the federation account. Well, Nigerians will want to know whose personal account this $6 billion was paid into, and only the minister is competent to answer this question. There are lots of shady deals going on between the NPDC on the one hand and both Atlantic Energy and Seven Energy on the other. Since the forensic audit is not going to investigate the NPDC, Atlantic Energy and Seven Energy, it would be important for the Senate to set up another panel of enquiry to ascertain the exact amount that has been stolen from the nation by these companies. The details from the available documents are quite nauseating.

Everyone knows that it is the petroleum minister that should really be answering the hard questions and not the management of the NNPC. The petroleum minister has no powers to commit the nation to such expenses and certainly no one believes her story, as there is nothing to show for the expenditure of N3 trillion. If Diezani had flouted the presidential directive and we all saw the use of the N3 trillion in the Niger Delta, for instance, then, the nation’s anger would not be as serious as it is now. Note that $20 billion expenditure in the Niger Delta would have changed that region forever. By the way, the cost of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China, which is the world’s largest single electricity station with an installed capacity of 22,500 megawatt, is only $26 billion.

Nigeria has simply been looted. Anyone who thinks this matter will just die off must be a joker. A lot more will come up in the coming weeks.
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Article originally published on Leadership Newspapers

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