Date Published: 01/15/10

Nigeria's oil stinks, says Audit Report

THE Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has released its second (2005) audit report of the Nigerian extractive industries in 2009.

The Regional Accountability Centre of the Niger Delta Budget Monitoring Group (NDEBUMOG) says from the audit report, the facts stink and raises doubts if any responsible state can allow a systemic misnomer ruin its nation in a way as is clear from indicators of the audit.

Executive Director of the transparency group, George-Hill Anthony, in an e-mail to our correspondent on Thursday said, '' it is worrisome that operators of the Nigerian state continue to sit and watch the destruction of Nigeria''.

According to him, ''our Regional Accountability Centre in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, set-up an internal team to carry-out a special independent report on the 2005 audit.

''NEITI’s National Stakeholders Working Group (NSWG) withheld and froze some (sensitive) elements of the report for reasons not known by the larger civil society partners of NEITI and against principles of the EITI global family at a time Nigeria is in dire need of EITI validation''.

Continuing, he claimed that facts from the audit are difficult to situate, measure, itemize nor marry to any lexicon of expressive words.

''Billions of dollars continue to look like pennies or cents. The amount involved if thoroughly and forensically recovered, can form an aggregate of Nigeria’s annual budgets for more than two years'', he said.

Adding, the NDEBUMOG boss said, ''crude oil are lifted, toyed, miscalculated, siphoned, fiscalized, defiscalized and unfiscalized in a way which even ordinary water cannot be toyed nor played with. These are in billions of barrels and associated to the reality of Oloibiri nightmare and discovery. Yet, the element

causing such havoc to Nigeria and its citizens is a commodity that has sent thousands of Nigerian citizens to their untimely graves either through armed struggles, poverty, diseases, oppression and from the recklessness of some policy overseers''.

''Unfortunately'', he went on, ''any Nigerian citizen or a state agent who has responsibility to effectively deliver the Nigerian state but negates same due to corruptocracy is liable to partaking in the killings of innocent citizens as maybe cause(d) by poverty, desperation, disease and therefore cannot be exonerated from

liability of the blood of the victims. That is the link between this Special Report titled:

The Oil Drums of Blood and the Complications of NEITI’’s 2005 Audit: Unearthing the Shadows''.

The group said they want civil society across the world to explore opportunities of using international anti-corruption instruments and litigation, ''at recovering huge levels of unaccounted oil money taken- away from Africa’s poor by International Oil Companies (IOCs) in collaboration with state collaborators in Africa''.

''Recommendations captured in our Special Report are within the roadmap of Nigeria’s Extractive Salvation. It is however surprising that at a time the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Bill, 2009 (HB.108) is being harmonised by Nigeria’s National Assembly with enormous empowerment proposition to Nigerian extrative companies taking transitive ownership of the

sector ironically is a time some Nigerian firms are also fingered in the extractive rascality, posing a devastative negation to Section 7, 10 (1) a, b, c and (2), 11, 12, 14, 28, 29, 33, 44 and 45 of the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Bill, 2009 (HB.108)'', he added.