Nigeria’s daily petrol consumption figures are ‘crazy’ and the country needs to move away from the petrol subsidy regime to end its ‘opaqueness.’
This was disclosed by the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, on Tuesday.
The minister, who spoke in an interview with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), said “there is nothing on the subsidy matter that has not been questioned.”
Sylva was reacting to the President of Nigerian Association of Energy Economists (NAEE), Yinka Omorogbe, a co-guest at the show, who said Nigeria must investigate how many litres of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) it consume and the differential between the landing cost and subsidy, among others.
The minister, however, said the figures fixed for Nigeria’s fuel consumption are inflated.
“But we should just sit down and interrogate that subsidy, subsidy price and see what we are paying for it and what’s in the landing costs,” Sylva said.
“There have been efforts at controlling smuggling. And then something dramatic happened. When we had the deregulation discussions, and the price moved up to N162 from N145 where I met it, we realised that the consumption dropped to less than 50 million litres or 40 million.
“So, later on, once the exchange rate also moved up a little bit and swallowed the gains we made from the N162 move, the figures increased again.
“And sometimes, the figures you hear are crazy. I mean, when they tell you 90 million litres a day, I mean, they’re crazy figures. So I mean, so for me, what is the total of all this? We’ve been interrogating these numbers for 20 years.
“We continue to interrogate these figures because we all know that there is a problem here, it’s opaque.
“The opportunity, the premium is not coming to the government and it is not going to the poor people. It is going to select people who are feeding fat on these things.
“So why don’t we just get rid of this thing? Okay, we should interrogate this thing, but I mean, to me, that is not the solution. Why don’t we just get rid of this whole subsidy so that we know that this problem is over once and for all?
“I mean, we agree that the figures are all opaque. We agree. That’s why we are saying look, let’s stop all the shenanigans. Let’s stop all this discussion.
“Let’s leave all this opaqueness, all this corruption in the subsidy, let us move away from subsidy and go on higher ground. And then they say no.
“There’s been trials of subsidy thieves. We’ve gone on television to say okay, these are the templates, these are the components of the templates.”
The minister said the labour union, which is against the removal of the subsidy, knows the issues, adding that Nigeria continues to haemorrhage because the subsidy regime persists.
“Why don’t we just get out of it? Okay, there has been some corruption. So we can always deal with the corruption issues,” Sylva said.
“We can always deal with all the opaque issues. But should we allow Nigerians who are not benefiting from this thing, as you agree with me, to continue to be haemorrhaging?
“Because we need to get out of this, because look at it, the N3 trillion budget. You can imagine if this N3 trillion were to be budgeted for something else. Who’s going to benefit from it? I’m not into the downstream, I’m not going to benefit.”
