Vunderkind
Social Member
Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria's minister for petroleum affairs has come out in a lengthy interview with Vanguard newspaper and has spoken about pitfalls in the N10 billion jet hire story and corruption in the subsidy system.
Speaking on the kerosene subsidy, she said: 'if anybody flouted the presidential order, it must have been the Minister of Petroleum at that time,' referring to the time the presidential directive to withdraw kerosene subsidy was given.
"But since the directive was not gazetted and was not announced it was not a law; it was mainly a directive on paper because there are procedures that a directive must follow to become a law and become implementable. I don’t know why people keep referring to this. Anyway, another president came and appointed his own cabinet and moved on."
Speaking on her efforts to rid the country of the corruption that was the subsidy system, she said: "it (subsidy on petroleum products) is a sore point because, in all honesty, just like PMS, it is a very difficult issue to handle.
"It becomes even more difficult when revenues are falling because of the price of the crude. It is very difficult to pay vast amounts on subsidy which we don’t believe is getting to the bottom line users of the PMS, but which is instead making middlemen fat."
"But we wanted to remove the subsidy.We wanted to deregulate too because we discovered that there was corruption in the subsidy system which had gone so bad that we were not able to move products seamlessly from one point to another. There was arbitrary price increase in some areas and products were selling above the regulated price thereby making nonsense of the subsidy scheme."
"Then there was round tripping, terrible incidence of round tripping. It got to the point that I even had to get the permission of Mr. President to invite the EFCC to come and look at the books and help us figure out what was happening because the level of PMS import we were getting clearly showed that something was wrong. That was in 2011...."
Click here to read full interview
Source: #Vanguard
Speaking on the kerosene subsidy, she said: 'if anybody flouted the presidential order, it must have been the Minister of Petroleum at that time,' referring to the time the presidential directive to withdraw kerosene subsidy was given.
"But since the directive was not gazetted and was not announced it was not a law; it was mainly a directive on paper because there are procedures that a directive must follow to become a law and become implementable. I don’t know why people keep referring to this. Anyway, another president came and appointed his own cabinet and moved on."
Speaking on her efforts to rid the country of the corruption that was the subsidy system, she said: "it (subsidy on petroleum products) is a sore point because, in all honesty, just like PMS, it is a very difficult issue to handle.
"It becomes even more difficult when revenues are falling because of the price of the crude. It is very difficult to pay vast amounts on subsidy which we don’t believe is getting to the bottom line users of the PMS, but which is instead making middlemen fat."
"But we wanted to remove the subsidy.We wanted to deregulate too because we discovered that there was corruption in the subsidy system which had gone so bad that we were not able to move products seamlessly from one point to another. There was arbitrary price increase in some areas and products were selling above the regulated price thereby making nonsense of the subsidy scheme."
"Then there was round tripping, terrible incidence of round tripping. It got to the point that I even had to get the permission of Mr. President to invite the EFCC to come and look at the books and help us figure out what was happening because the level of PMS import we were getting clearly showed that something was wrong. That was in 2011...."
Click here to read full interview
Source: #Vanguard