The Cow Will Die

By Ikechi Ibeji

Typical of us Nigerians, we have already forgotten a very embarrassing controversy which took the nation by storm, less than two weeks ago. The Minister of State for Finance, Remi Babalola jolted all of us by telling a meeting of the Federation Account Allocation Committee that Nigeria’s National Oil Company was “insolvent” and therefore not able to pay what it owed the Federation Account Committee from crude oil sales. NNPC fired back that the Ministry of Finance owed to it several multiples of what the Federation Accounts Committee was claiming. The embattled Babalola claims (and rightly too) that the payments NNPC was demanding as money it spent on petroleum products subsidies were nebulous and could not just be accepted by government with no verification.
It is understandable that the government needed to cobble together a response to a “blunder” by one of its own, with the comic sight of the Ministers of Finance and Information sitting next to Babalola after a Federal Executive Council meeting to state “the true position” of things with the NNPC. (By the way, the man is still keeping his job).
Theoretically, if NNPC owns all the oil and gas assets of the Federal Government, it cannot be said to be insolvent on account of a mere N400 plus billion it owes (and has been unable to pay for a long while now). But that is where it ends.
The NNPC started its downhill trek when the good work done by Chief Philip Asiodu, Chief Festus Marinho and Chief Meshach Feyide was thrown out of the window, with the organogram and long term strategic plans totally distorted and bastardised. It then became usual for specially anointed unskilled fellows to be ferried straight to top positions in NNPC, with no hint about what to do with their positions (other than convert the plenty money they saw into their personal use!). Corruption thus became official and promotion was no longer based on skills and merit but on where you came from or which Oga slept with you. More damage had to be inflicted on the organisation when fine gentlemen and outstanding professionals were forced out – in several cases penniless, laying the field open for total loss of decorum in a free for all. The Military rulers threw out “obstacles” in the likes of Festus Marinho, Aret Adams, Thomas John, Edmund Daukoru and Chambers Oyibo among others, quite prematurely, robbing the organisation of the immense skills and training possessed by these gentlemen.
Those were the boom years when pepper too much. Now the golden hen or should we say the fattened cow has been milked dry and it no longer can stand without first aid. The mago mago in NNPC can no longer be supported by its diminishing resources and if something drastic is not done quickly, the cow may drop dead any moment.
As I said earlier, it was incumbent on government to defend the corporate integrity and financial standing of NNPC. It is the responsible thing to do under the circumstances, given that a sustained perception of NNPC as an insolvent institution would erode confidence in the Nigerian investment climate. But action needs to be taken quickly to arrest the accelerated downward spin through vigorous pursuit of the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill and its full implementation. In this day and age when younger National Oil Companies are performing exploits in far flung corners of the globe, Nigeria can no longer afford to pamper her underperforming NOC.