PRESS STATEMENT MARCH 1ST 2009
WITHDRAWAL OIL SUBSIDY
DOUBLE JOEPARDY FOR NIGERIANS
‘The huge fiscal burden we cannot continue to meet. We have found out that we are really inefficiencies, fraud, and racketeering in the whole production chain and in that context basically given the competing needs for scarce resources, government felt we need to do something. We are also subsidizing other countries.’ -----Mansur Muhktar, Minister of Finance.
Conference of Nigeria Political Parties {CNPP}, after an emergency meeting over President Umaru Musa Yaradua’s grave decision to withdraw Oil Subsidy and total Deregulation of the Oil Sector; resolved to join forces with Labour and other progressives to stop the ungodly and unpatriotic move to subject Nigerians to double jeopardy by a failed government. The recommendation of the Presidential Steering Committee on the Global Financial Crisis for withdrawal of oil subsidy in the midst of abject poverty, decayed infrastructure, poor electricity and gross unemployment is insensitive, enslavement and anti-people.
Whereas, we acknowledge the drop in the oil prices; however President Yaradua should admit that the Peoples Democratic Party {PDP}’s controlled Federal Government has not only for the past ten years been subsidizing inefficiency, fraud and racketeering; but consolidating looting and squandermania of our golden-oil-age. Therefore we are opposed to the paradox, where Nigerians after losing to fraudsters will also loose oil subsidy, probably the only paltry gain from the oil endowment.
Is not paradoxical that it took President Yaradua almost two years to discover the fraud and racketeering going on in the oil industry, to discover that prominent donors to his campaign fund and N6 billion for the construction of PDP Headquarters in Abuja and sundries hand-out, did not discover computer or telephone; but are importers of fuel products and looters of our golden-oil-age? This is the same president who proclaimed at his inaugural speech, that the war against corruption is my fight; but today did not see corruption as the greatest impediment to our development.
CNPP is appalled that President Yaradua willfully subverts Section 15{15} by shielding and protecting fortune seekers - ex-president Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, ex-governors and cronies, who loot our golden oil proceeds, who refuse for years to repair or build new refineries and benefit from importation of refined fuel products; is now forcing Nigerians to more hardship and enslavement while protecting fortune seekers.
When news got to Nigerians in 2008 that those like Mr Albert Stanley who master minded bribery of Nigerians in the Oil industry- Haliburton, Siemens, Wilbrous et al are being tried in the USA and Germany, President Yaradua dispatched his garrulous Attorney General, vowed to get to the root of the scandals. What happened, a case in point is the Siemens saga, where in a display of righteous indignation, government blacklisted Siemens and months later, a multimillion Naira energy contract was awarded as a pat on the back to the same corrupt Siemens and Nigerians shielded till date.
CNPP is forced to ask, where is the rule of law, where is our bail-out, where is the excess crude account, where is the reserve for the rainy day and where is the over N600 trillion that accrued through oil sales?
We are not sure that up-to-date, questions raised over a year ago by the Accountant General of the Federation, Alhaji Ibrahim Dankwabo and Engineer Hamman T ukur, Chairman Revenue Mobilization, Allocation and Fiscal Commission {RMAFC}, to the effect that there are insufficient information on the activities of NNPC, due to leakages in Oil Revenue, same is applicable in Tax revenues and Customs revenues, have been resolved?
CNPP for the umpteenth time is opposed to free market ideology and false assumption that a country can attain a capitalist state, without first constructing an industrial society through massive infrastructure. The chicken have come home to roost, while the industrialized world are bailing out their economy, providing subsidies, President Yaradua and his team are deregulating, what a paradox?
CNPP has known from all accounts that PDP Federal Government is not only incapable of managing our economy, but is a failed regime. For us the PDP and their private sector cronies in Nigeria are fortune seekers who wear the toga of captains of industry without industry, call themselves Corporate Nigeria and fund electoral fraud, transact foreign exchange and aid capital flight.
Our anger is that our own Comrade Adams Oshihmole, governor of Edo State, is part of this fraud against Nigerians, a presidential committee that wittingly failed to ask, where is the over N600 trillion oil proceeds that accrued to the country between July 1999 and July 2008, covering the golden-oil-age when a barrel of oil sold for several years over $100 USD and the country is still in darkness, with bad roads, poor social services and gross unemployment.
CNPP cautions that selling the Petroleum Refineries as scraps, without prosecuting those who collected billions of dollars for the repair of the refineries, like in the power sector, will amount to the greatest crime against the good people of Nigeria. We understand that arrangements have been concluded to sell the refineries as scraps to the cronies of the regime, who profited from the monumental corruption being consolidated not subsidized in the oil industry.
Finally it is our considered view that it is not enough to tell us how N1.63 trillion was used to subsidize oil in the last three years or N640 billion in 2008, but how much was realized, how much was fleeced away, which projects were executed with the trillions of Naira duly budgeted and how much is left in the treasury. We are interested in how much was fleeced away into private pockets and efforts the government is making to recover the missing funds? The government must come to equity with clean hands and must stop protecting fortune seekers and taxing common folks. Nigerians must say No to Withdrawal of Oil Subsidy.
Osita Okechukwu
National Publicity Secretary
CNPP
08039738870
