Ewolewoo!!

Emmanuel Kachikwu(GMD of NNPC) is talking which is good. He is saying some things which are quite important to be looked into. We need to check his statement out, with less grammar, and make it more basic to understand. He said NNPC is owing US$6billion in cash call arrears and losing 230 billion naira (about US$1.1 billion ) annually from its refining and marketing operations. However, he re-iterated the fact that NNPC is not broke because of its assets base and equity holdings. I still don’t get it.

You owe 6 billion dollars and losing 1.1 billion dollars annually from your operations yet you still claim to be in good business? Something is not right somewhere. It is either there is some money stored(saved?) somewhere else running the business or there is something generating some money for the business that we don’t know of. This statement is confusing to say the least. Can you go to a market, inform the market woman that you couldn’t pay to bear with you because your father has some assets that would soon be bequeathed to you? There are so many things not clear cut in NNPC’s case.

Go to many I.O.Cs(International Oil Companies), they are not ready to get involved in any major JV venture with NNPC because to pay is wahala. They all know what it takes to get their money from any JV with NNPC. It has been turbulent for many of them. This has stalled many projects and even gotten some outrightly suspended or cancelled. This is a very sad commentary of the JV issues as we can observe.

It now goes to the real question of the day. How come NNPC is in debt of $6 billion dollars despite the unprecedented amount made in crude oil sales in the last 6 years?  We know that within 2009 and 2014 crude oil prices were always overshooting the budget benchmarks, what happened to the money made then? How come NNPC still owes despite these huge sales made during the last years? What kind of deals did NNPC enter to generate such amount of unpaid debts?

Saudi Arabia saved her crude sales for the raining days. Infact Saudi Arab is offering discounted rates on her crude oil as we speak. You could get saudi oil for less than $40/barrel on discounts. They could even offer you the advantage of “buy now, pay later” on top of that. This is made very possible because of the huge savings made by the leaders of the country. Do we have capacity to do that? Naaa!!!  We couldn’t offset our debts when the crude oil sale was at over $US110/barrel, is it now that it’s less than US$45/barrel that we would now settle it? This is no rocket science.

What kind of operational cost has NNPC been operating on that we were losing 230 billion naira annually on refining and marketing? Mind you, we were told for many years that the refineries have been comatose, so what happened? What was NNPC spending on when we’ve been told that Government is heavily subsidizing petroleum oil imports for so many years due to refineries not working? How were they getting this kind of annual loss when we’ve been told that nothing is working and it is Government that has been spending so much to keep the cooperation afloat. This is classical case of “Double Jeopardy” on Nigerians I tell you. Some people have become billionaires out of nothing? God dey sha !!

There are so many questions begging for answers that NNPC needs to explain. I would still repeat the question I asked earlier: How would NNPC get the money now with less than $45 dollars/barrel crude oil sales, when it couldn’t do so when crude was selling above $110/barrel? How? If the corruption appetite couldn’t be satisfied then, is it now that crude oil is cheaper that it would be satisfied?

The way many Nigerians are looking for Government money, even with the drastic reduction in revenue, has even made this issue more precarious. NNPC is a big problem I tell you. Solve it and you’ve solved a major part of revenue streams into the government. Meanwhile, people need to vomit money o!! This is just criminal…Ewolewoooo!!!