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.
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